


to carthage then i came

by Lvslie



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale's Dithering, Crowley's Existential Dread, Developing Relationship, Finding Peace?, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Literary References & Allusions, M/M, Moving In Together, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Self-Doubt, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, and all the unsaid things, as someone once said And I Burned Too, it's Catholic guilt babey!, or just the guilt of existing and wanting., the cottage
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-13
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-05-01 16:30:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 17,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19181608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lvslie/pseuds/Lvslie
Summary: Across the floor, Aziraphale has stilled.‘Loved love, Augustine,’ Crowley picks up, voice quiet, looking at the red-streaked open palm of his hand. ‘How noble. But what if he couldn’t? Theory. Theory’s one thing, but—ah, has no one ever done it the wrong way? No one envied, loved the wrong thing, for the wrong reason, in the worst of circumstances? Has no one ever hated love? It hurts, doesn’t it? It must hurt. Else what would be the point of all the self-denial.’[Aziraphale and Crowley after the Apocalypse, on the brink of becoming something else than they have been, with all the doubts and apprehensions to still approach and work through.]





	1. a game of chess

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HoloXam](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HoloXam/gifts).



> the sheer force of people commenting on my old fic which raised me up from my year-long good omens grave ……… chills, guys. chills
> 
> i reread what i wrote, thought about the fertile soil of the adaptation, and thought to myself, _play it again sam_
> 
> i’m a bit rusty round the edges, and this is probably a mix of book-compliant and tv-compliant, and whoever read whatever i’d written in the past knows my predilection for crowley’s extistential dread and aziraphale’s slight edge of bitchiness so. yeah
> 
> i looked at the first word i typed in and thought to myself, man this is gonna ache

_To Carthage then I came_

_Burning burning burning burning_

_O Lord Thou pluckest me out_

_O Lord Thou pluckest_

_burning_

 

 

_I._

 

The bus jerks to a halt as soon as they glide into the peripheries of Mayfair. Truthfully, it’s an inanity: they could have been left at Crowley’s very porch sans any questioning, but Aziraphale finds himself too dizzy to voice it as he comes to.

‘That’s our stop, angel.’ There’s Crowley’s voice, oddly distant.

Aziraphale blinks, focusing on his shape, looming against the backdrop of dark leaves and lampposts outside of the window. Everything seems eerie, disorienting.

He must have— _wonder of wonders_ —fallen asleep, God’s last hypocrite, what with all the centuries of berating Crowley for it, denouncing his proclivity as a _hideous_ _human habit_.

Eyes still bleary, he accepts Crowley’s outstretched hand without any questioning that clarity of mind would surely trigger, instead allowing himself to be led out of the vehicle without as much as echoing the vague _thank you_ Crowley throws at the bewildered driver.

Crowley’s fingers are long and startlingly  _cold_ , smudged still with something black that should’ve been long taken care of.

It’s crisply cold outside as well, shockingly so. Wet. As if through a haze, Aziraphale recollects that somewhere around St Pancras rain has started falling, not a drizzle but a proper rain, steady as they cut deeper into the layers of London.

All the world, now, seems to be sunk in a trembling shiver of splintered lamplight, quieter than ever in daylight. A flood, a cleansing. Symbolic, if not—

‘A little obnoxious,’ Aziraphale mutters, in disdain.

‘Think of it as a bookend,’ comes Crowley’s mutter, still strangely faraway. ‘I do. The garden, here. Always bloody rain.’

A lamp flickers. Aziraphale’s hand becomes suddenly aware of persisting _touch_.                             

_The garden, here._

Slightly thrown-off, either by the perversity of such shut-in silence reigning over London or by Crowley’s seamless follow-up to a remark which for all intents and purposes should have been incomprehensible, Aziraphale hesitates. He withdraws his hand.

Crowley stands with his head thrown back, looking up. A spindly dark shape, shoulders bent slightly forward with weariness. _Unprepossessing_.

‘Unreal,’ he mutters, as if to himself. There’s, again, something unreachable in his voice, hollowed out. Aziraphale can see the tension in his jaw as he closes his mouth and swallows.

‘Crowley,’ he blurts, gripped by a sudden irrational fear. ‘Your place—’

‘S’just round the corner,’ Crowley says, softer now, tilting his head back down.

 _Those damned glasses_ , Aziraphale thinks. A terrible concealing thing, so many times an enemy to certainty, lending so much to flight of imagination.

‘Still, I assume,’ Crowley says dimly. ‘ _We’re_ still intact, so—’ 

‘Still?’ Aziraphale repeats, dazed again. There are droplets of water clinging to Crowley’s hair, one of them trailing down the sharp slope of one of his cheekbones.

‘I’m not _sure_ ,’ Crowley mutters cryptically, taking off again, ‘C’mon.’ 

He makes a broad vague move as though to usher Aziraphale forward, hand brushing idly by the angel’s elbow, fingers pulling lightly. Quite against reason, a shiver travels through Aziraphale’s body. He hesitates. 

There’s no obvious logic to it, certainly, to find anything in _this_ intimate or foreign after years and decades of such little unspeakable collisions and courtesies.

At least Aziraphale tells himself so.

But as Crowley leans against the door, fumbling with the key as though there was any need to open them the usual way—in a disarming nod, perhaps, to their self-imposed millennia-long spectacle of pretend humanity—Aziraphale _watches_ , and something inside him aches.

An irrational feeling, surely, nonsensical. One of the demon’s shoulders is pressed into the door and Crowley nearly falls in backwards as the lock relents, arms spread in a way that instead of nonchalant seems almost vulnerable, a small smile on his narrow face. 

‘Welcome, pilgrim,’ he says, stumbling slightly and making a hazy arch in the air around him, ‘you have returned, the prodigal son in tow.’

‘Which is which?’ Aziraphale asks with a strained smile, stepping inside. The cool dreary composure of tall concrete-grey walls seems somehow intimidating.

Crowley draws in a sharp breath—wet top-to-toe, seemingly even thinner than usually. ‘Fair question.’

Before he can second-guess the impulse or dwell long enough on the stark hostility of their morbid surroundings to arrive any worrying conclusion about the connotations of Crowley’s housing habits, Aziraphale lets the door fall shut behind him and approaches him.

He stops backtracking as if on cue, stilling in one spot.

They stand face to face. Eyes to glasses. Restless, Aziraphale’s hands fly up to the lapels of Crowley’s blazer, pluck feebly at the ruined fabric. Ash and water, a dark residue on his fingers now. Or maybe it was there before, from Crowley’s fingers—

‘I don’t think even a miracle will help these,’ Aziraphale observes, fatuous.

‘I don’t think I’m even _capable_ of any,’ Crowley murmurs, oddly docile. ‘At this point.’

_Think of something or I won’t ever speak to you again._

Aziraphale exhales slowly. ‘Perhaps not, but the big one was quite _effective_.’

Crowley snorts. It would be a nice thing, nice _bookend_ , Aziraphale thinks fleetingly, to see him genuinely smile, but he bows his head slightly, as though to duck or maybe let it fall to Aziraphale’s shoulder.

No, not _quite_.

‘Thanks,’ Crowley mutters, thickly. ‘I think we should maybe take that _off_.’

Aziraphale’s hands twitch, imperceptibly, where they’re still smoothening the wrinkles in Crowley’s suit.

‘Off?’ he manages, head spinning. 

As if reading his mind, Crowley inhales sharply and steps back, further into the flat.

‘Yeah,’ he says tightly, moving as though to try and nervously shake off his jacket. He finally manages to shuck it and toss to the floor. A faint layer of soot-black dust, wispy, falls off him to a gust of wind, and scatters on the spotless floor in inky smudges. Aziraphale stares after it.

‘No miracles, you said,’ he says, frowning.

‘I’m not _doing_ anything,’ Crowley replies absently. ‘I’m kind of … stuck. He said no _meddling_ , didn’t he? Adam. But I can still _feel_ it all, locked. Happened, not happened, it doesn’t know it, it’s … confused.’

He looks a little unhinged. Aziraphale frowns. ‘It?’

Crowley exhales shakily. ‘The … world. In limbo. Can feel it _ssstill_ on me, kind of like … clinging, old world, new world, jussst something, kind of in between—’ he trails off, at a loss.

‘So it’s not over yet?’ Aziraphale says quietly, hardly moving. ‘Are you sure?’

He has an unpleasant impression of something heavy and physical remaining present in his pocket, reminding himself of its existence. Scrap of parchment. A sudden sting of awareness. _Ah, yes._

 _Fire._  

For a moment, Crowley doesn’t do anything. Then he stammers, ungainly. ‘No. I … I don’t know. I’m … confused. I _thought_ it did.’ 

The mild, misplaced wind is still there, moving the tips of his dishevelled hair. Crowley sighs.

‘I’ll get some wine,’ he says, clearer now, if a little dejected. ‘You get yourself comfortable. We have some celebrating to do.’

He smiles—it’s brittle again, boyish, and Aziraphale loses track of thought for a moment. His heart tugs.

‘Quite right,’ he whispers, as Crowley disappears.

After a beat, he steps forward. He tugs on his bowtie along the way, pulling it untied, then shakes off the coat and unbuttons the vest. Rounding the corner, he falters lightly— 

but there’s no mystery, there. Only the balcony door, swung wide open, with only the thin sheer curtain billowing into the spacious cold room.

It, too, feels oddly vacant, uninhabited. Aziraphale hangs his overgarments on his arm as he walks in, scanning the surroundings with an involuntary frown. _Everything_ , the sparse furniture in a style he can’t trust himself to reliably name, the immaculate grey surfaces of the walls and floor, the unfinished painting, the unnaturally lush wall of stunningly well-tended morbid houseplants.

Such stillness inside, such aggressive starkness. He pictures the bedroom: a large white bed, sterile sheets, no window.

A shiver, again.

There’s a record player in the corner, dissonantly old-fashioned. Aziraphale starts towards it like moth to flame, blaming his unease on the silence. It’s _strange_ here, different than the dense cosy stillness of his cluttered bookshop. Untidy, warm, homely—

 _Hold that thought_. His throat tightens. The music starts with a dry crack, poignant.

Aziraphale whispers to himself, ‘This feels so—’

 _‘_ Feels so _what?’_

He starts. 

Languid, long-strided, Crowley shuffles to the balcony door and closes it with one shoulder. All charming uncoordinated limbs and wobbly grace, quiet like a cat.

Aziraphale swallows. _So unlike you_ , he thinks.

He says, ‘Nothing.’

 

_II._

 

‘That’s _new_ ,’ he hears himself blurting, sauntering further into the living room, a bottle and two glasses tucked under his arm. 

Aziraphale has twitched, as if burned, at the sound of his voice, and leapt away from the record player.

He looks _strange_ , in his saddle shoes and white shirt with the top button of the collar undone, with a bundle of velvet and tartan flung across his arm. Clashing, stunningly, with the entirety of space around him, drawing attention like a flare.

That, too, feels strange, because he’s had Crowley’s attention caught and centred on him, whole, for overwhelming stretches time already, unspeakable times, and this is just—

‘What is?’ Aziraphale asks, uncertainly. His eyes skim down Crowley’s body, briefly, as though similarly distracted. ‘Has something changed, then?’ 

Crowley nods at the vinyl, circling the centre of the room with Aziraphale in it and depositing himself on the floor by the couch. The angel’s eyes follow him, inscrutable, all the way.

‘The music,’ Crowley says, positioning the glasses precariously on the table and trying to shift his attention to the stabilising act of pouring wine. ‘Used to be all Mercury.’ 

‘The—planet?’ Aziraphale says, ridiculously in earnest, and it’s so fatally endearing Crowley has to swallow down an irrational rush of strong affection. 

His grip falters a little, red spilling over.

‘No, the _bebop_ ,’ he replies, a little curtly, biting into the inside of his cheek. He wipes the spill off with his cuff. ‘Haven’t you really noticed it’s always bloody …’ Crowley pauses, sobering.

‘I suppose _you,_ of all people, really wouldn’t,’ he says at length.

He looks up when silence persists into a drawn-out minute. Aziraphale is watching him with that odd face again, like earlier in the corridor: guilt and a smidge of something else, infinitely more confusing.

Like he’s reading into it, expecting something that would, if they’re being honest, be wildly unprecedented, were it to happen. But it’s there, a vigilance, a hunted tense look like Crowley’s still a predator crawling around his prey.

Suddenly mildly nauseous, Crowley looks down. He can’t even think of a reason now.

The music continues oozing from the record player, something about _playing with fire_ , of all things, as Aziraphale approaches carefully and lowers himself to the floor across from Crowley. 

Crowley smiles at him. By some grace, Aziraphale does mirror it—wan as it may be. 

‘What shall we do now?’ the angel murmurs, linking his hands in his lap. His legs are outstretched, ankles crossed.

‘ _What shall we ever do?_ ’ Crowley counters, murmuring. ‘Live, I s’pose. Continue on. Start _over_.’

In a frankly inane burst of chivalry, he leans gallantly across the table and hands Aziraphale his glass. Ever-cautious, the angel coaxes it out of his grasp and leans away, resting against the armchair behind him. 

‘Game Over, Insert Coin?’ he mutters, taking a sip.

‘So you _do_  listen,’ Crowley says, almost brightly, and smiles again. ‘Well, yes. A nice little _memento mori_ we’ve had, and if it’s over—’

‘If,’ Aziraphale enunciates, pouting slightly before he tastes his wine again.

‘I told you I’m not sure,’ Crowley says, suddenly nettled. ‘Stop being so nit-picky, my personal—’ he cuts off. Frowns. 

_Personal._

‘What is it?’ Aziraphale sighs, not unkindly. ‘Run out of insults, have you?’

‘Hell. _Should_ be personal,’ Crowley says, disregarding him. ‘Were it to _work_ —’ 

‘Implying it doesn’t?’ Aziraphale says, brows rising a little. 

‘Do you see us _reigning in terror_ , Aziraphale? It works _no more_ than Heaven,’ Crowley replies, at length. 

‘Personal Heaven,’ the angel says wonderingly, and winces as though he’s tasted something foul. ‘ _Goodness_.’

To his own surprise, Crowley giggles. He tries to mask his grin with a clumsy hand pressed to the mouth, unsuccessfully. Blessed miraculous _wine_. 

‘ _Reach out and touch faith_ ,’ he intones, voice giddy.

‘Oh,’ Aziraphale groans, agonised. ‘ _No_.’

‘We’d actually have to work,’ Crowley tells him, leaning forward. Aziraphale cringes even more, trying to wave him away. ‘If they figured out how to meddle _properly_. Actually work, instead of—’

‘ _Begone_ , vile man, and hold that thought,’ Aziraphale says morosely, drawing something wobbly and circular in the air and looking sullen. ‘Begone from—’

Feeling oddly meek, and _quite_ abashed by the sharp overwhelming wave of ridiculous devotion, Crowley withdraws, huddling back next to the couch. Aziraphale blinks, disoriented, his hazy eyes half-betrayed.

‘Well. To incompetency, then,’ Crowley says quietly, raising his glass.

‘Ah. But _whose?_ ’ Aziraphale points out, either still _too_ sober or not sober enough. His shoulders sag a little and he stares ahead, desolate.

Feeling audacious, Crowley opens his mouth, ‘Her Holiest—’

‘No,’ Aziraphale cuts in, frantically, raising a warning finger at him, ‘better _not_. We don’t want to draw _attention_.’

Crowley snorts, only a notch fatalistic. Then he pauses.

There’s a tightness of the ribs, an odd not-quite-constrained anxiety, coiled in his chest, unresolved. He wants to saying something but the possibility of saying too much is, all of the sudden, terrifying beyond comprehension.

But this tension, this age-old sickening _left unsaid_ of theirs, has grown—in presence of his own exhaustion and confusion, which he tries so ardently to conceal from Aziraphale—almost unendurable. Fighting himself just a moment longer, Crowley falters.

‘To you, then,’ he says quickly, a little too quickly to be truthfully neutral, bowing his head. ‘ _Il miglior fabbro._ Efficient inefficiency.’

‘I thought we agreed,’ the angel murmurs. He sounds distant, imprecise, ‘It was a matter of deep, _mutual_ incompetence, and—’

Crowley shakes his head, curling in further on himself and tilting his glass in the air. Bracing himself, he tries to ignore the violent tug of his heart and looks up.

‘You worked it out.’ 

‘I had the _book_ ,’ Aziraphale points out, gently chiding. His face is softened, bright even in the wan light of the living room. ‘And you left.’

Crowley swallows.

 _To be saved_ , he thinks. _Which stopped making sense as soon as—_  

The pressure grows unbearable.

‘ _Wanted_ to leave,’ he corrects the angel, mouth dry in spite of the wine. ‘And not on my own.’

‘That’s such a difference?’ Aziraphale says, looking away to the record player, gone suddenly quiet. 

Crowley looks down, onto his hands. He flexes the fingers of the right one, long and unstable, an angry red mark still cutting across the palm where the steering wheel would be. He wants to swallow again but finds himself stuck.

‘Difference as in _De Doctrina Christiana_ , _sin is any thought in opposition to the word of God_ , maybe not,’ he says quietly, straining his voice into the best semblance of sobriety he can muster while still dangerously hazy round the edges. He looks up, meeting Aziraphale’s wary eyes. ‘Difference between think and act, yes. And I think—I _think_ there is. A difference.’

Weary now, Aziraphale presses his eyes closed.

‘This feels,’ he says with a sigh, ‘a little too much like a game of chess for being a celebration.’

Aziraphale: lines under his eyes, expression always a little baffled, a mess of grey-blonde curls in a perpetual halo around his bright face. His uncertain mouth. Stymied now, and so newly, _tangibly_ corporeal.

No, that’s not the word, something more—temporary? _Fragile?_

Cutting the aching thought before it expands into something like cold terror, Crowley grips the neck of the bottle, pulling his knees back to himself, cradling it between them. 

‘So I lied,’ he says, throat tight as he swallows. ‘So what. What else would you expect.’

The angel opens his eyes. Bright eyes, blue eyes, again so dissonantly fierce.

‘Ah, so it’s _that_ rabbit you’re chasing,’ he says, tranquil only on the surface. ‘Personal journeys.’

‘Shut up,’ Crowley says, mostly because he feels like the resemblance is a little too on the nose and he’d rather not lose track of thought. ‘It’s a fair question. What _did_ you expect?’

To his—surprise, maybe, or maybe disillusionment—Aziraphale hesitates. Something grey and amorphous, like guilt, passes through his face in a shadow.

‘I thought you may have gone,’ he says at last, reluctant. ‘I _hoped_ you wouldn’t.’

For some reason it hurts. Crowley can’t break it down, not quite, into any logic but it hurts nonetheless. Feeling like he’s sinking down again, he hazards, ‘Because …?’ 

Aziraphale looks at him, then, properly. The same look he’s had in the street, hard and impenetrable.

‘You’re asking me why I wanted someone to refrain from being cowardly,’ he says, not quite a question. Perhaps accusing.

Suddenly bitter, Crowley stares back. He stretches his legs. ‘Yes,’ he says, finally. ‘Not someone, _me_. Whose nature, _to you_ —is so inherently different from yours. _Expect_ me to be gone, then, did you? Be fair.’

And Aziraphale looks, in that moment, almost angry. With hurt eyes, he says, ‘ _No._ ’ 

The force of it, something so small but infinite, said aloud, strikes Crowley breathless.

He remains, tense and miserable with his belaboured flighty heart, rendered momentarily futile. O _h, don’t think I’m testing you. Don’t think I’m merely playing—_

He begins, disjointed and mostly desperate by now, ‘Nothing selfish in it, then, just—you know, _angelsss_. Compassion extended, your—your umbrella of—’ he cuts off, in sudden panic, and nearly breaks the glass.

Aziraphale’s icy expression thaws, in mere seconds, in favour of worry. ‘Crowley, _what_ are you—’

‘You’ve said,’ Crowley interrupts, steadying his voice and attempting more clarity, ‘in Tadfield. A feeling of love, there. A _general_ feeling, a place devoid of … of malice, of terror. And I didn’t _get_ it. Because I wouldn’t get it.’

Aziraphale shakes his head midway through his utterance, slow, something sad and ancient, like maybe remorse, flicking once again through his features.

‘Crowley, that’s … that’s formality,’ he says, emphatically. ‘St Augustine in Carthage, _a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about me. I was not yet in love, but I was in love with love …_ it's a whole … paradigm, dear boy, it’s like a sixth sense. You’re not suited—’

‘I’m not suited,’ Crowley cuts in, shaking now, ‘because I don’t see it that way. Never have.’

Aziraphale smiles, a little sadly, ‘But that’s just what I’m _saying._ ’

Crowley slams the wine bottle back onto the table. It’s rapid, loud. Aziraphale does not flinch.

‘No. _No_ , because that would mean there’s only one _way_.’ 

‘And there isn’t?’

‘Has this, _all_ this,’ Crowley insists, voice pained, drawing an arch in the air with both hands now, ‘really not taught you anything about perspective?’

There’s a moment’s silence.

Then Aziraphale smiles again. He looks down, _bashful_ , and makes a small gesture as though to raise a toast again.

‘Ah. Point taken, my dear.’

Trying to pay no mind to either the endearment _or_ the odd echo of his own phrasing in the angel’s voice, Crowley nods and collects his scattered thoughts.

‘If it’s easy to—but it’s not _always_ ,’ he presses, pushing himself up and leaning forward, cold hands tucked between his knees. ‘Too straightforward, wouldn’t it be? Doesn’t it say, _judge not?_ So if there’s something concealed—’ 

Aziraphale looks tired. Behind him, the wind pushes the balcony door open again, slow and undeliberate, and he stares after it.

‘Oh, be fair, Crowley,’ he says quietly. ‘I never denied anyone the right to convert.’

Crowley shuts his eyes, then opens them. _Perhaps I want too much. Perhaps I am hopeless too._

‘To _convert_?’ he repeats even so, strained. ‘You’re saying it as though it needs a special environment, Aziraphale.’

He reaches blindly for the glass, swallows down some wine: it stings the back of his throat, dry, desensitising. Everything is swaying, just so, round the edges. ‘That’s delusional. That’s _condescending_.’

Aziraphale watches him steadily with his glazed exhausted eyes for a moment, as though trying to gauge something. He opens his mouth, expression a mixture between uneasy and searching.

‘Your perspective, then,’ he says at last, carefully neutral. ‘Talk me through it.’

Crowley licks his lips, leaning slowly back.

‘Nothing special, I’d _sssay_ ,’ he says tightly, unable to help the vague hissing lilt. He drums his fingers on his knee. Aziraphale’s eyes follow the movement languorously, wine-dulled, half-troubled. He seems slightly put-off. ‘The _human_ way.’

At this, the angel’s expression sharpens. ‘Human?’

‘Well,’ Crowley begins, letting himself sink back into the white leather couch, stare up at the distant ceiling. Reality feels a little distant by this point, impalpable. ‘To a point. But they do see the whole thing as something less than eternal, don’t they. Not fixed, not obvious, not _sensible_. Unexpected, something you can’t _help_ , something … something to _lose_ if left unattended. Selfish. _Fragile_.’ 

Aziraphale sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose. He sounds tired. ‘You’re difficult to follow sometimes.’

‘Difficult?’ Crowley echoes, feeling hollow. ‘Am I too fast? Am I going—’

And just like that, there’s something new in the silence between them, a tightening. The glass almost slips from his grasp, sliding from between languid fingers. His vision clouds. 

‘—too fast for you?’ 

Across the floor, Aziraphale has stilled.

‘ _Loved love_ , Augustine,’ Crowley picks up, voice quiet, looking at the red-streaked open palm of his hand. ‘How noble. But what if he couldn’t? Theory. Theory’s one thing, but—ah, has no one ever done it the wrong way? No one _envied_ , loved the wrong thing, for the wrong reason, in the worst of circumstances? Has no one ever _hated_ love? It hurts, doesn’t it? It must hurt. Else what would be the point of all the self-denial.’

Aziraphale doesn’t raise his face, still uncannily motionless.

‘What you said,’ he begins at last, some odd colourless urgency in his muted voice, ‘about loss—’

‘That happens, too,’ Crowley says, weakly, feeling his throat constrict. ‘I’ve heard. To die, or be left in the middle of it, or—’

He looks up again, feeling dizzy. In the wan bluish light pooling through the half-drawn blinds, murky as the cloudy night outside, the ceiling seems an imprecise border too far away to reach except by blind faith of leaping upwards, hoping for still having wings. 

The antonym of falling, perhaps. Still just as terrible.

Aziraphale speaks out, again, ‘But death is—’

Feeling hazy, Crowley cuts in, cuts him off, ‘ _Stop all the clocks.’_

Aziraphale finally looks up properly, eyes wide open. The worst sort of innocence to see in him, because _genuine_ —rare as it is.

Crowley inhales, enduring, almost shaking to the erratic beating of his heart.

 _‘Cut off the telephone,_ ’ he picks up, hoarsely. _‘Silence the pianos and, with muffled drum, bring out the coffin. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead, scribbling in the sky the message—’_

Aziraphale swallows audibly, ‘I don’t—’

 _ _‘_ He is dead_.’

Silence now, and so burning at that. The wine stings at the back of his throat. Crowley opens his mouth. Inhales.

‘ _He was my north, my south, my east and west_ ,’ he goes on, voice thready again, all pressure of intonation gone somewhere irretrievable, _‘my working week and Sunday rest, my noon, my midnight, my talk, my song. I thought that love would last forever, I was—’_

Aziraphale’s face is frightening in the wan light: still as time itself, all the way back in the garden. Only the wide eyes, gleaming vaguely with something ethereal, fixed on him across the whole tremendous insurmountable distance from couch to armchair. Fixed, as though in resentment or hope. 

Resentment for hope. 

‘ _—wrong_ ,’ Crowley finishes, voice cracking into something too audible, too jarring in this frail liminal space between deep night and early morning.

 _Cracking fire._ He almost blinks, too.

The silence is vast, stifling. He’s breathing through open mouth, eyes wet and humiliating as he stares across the room, searching for a mirroring expression. His lips are stiff and pliant.

‘Was I?’ he asks, feeling shattered.

‘Crowley,’ Aziraphale says, barely even vocal.

It’s too much. Something inside Crowley flickers from desolation to desperation, quick, angry.

‘A snap of fingers, and you were gone,’ he breathes out, sharp. ‘All that holy blasted self-denial, to waste. Up in flames, and I’m left there, without as much as—a fucking _word_. Where is that profound, Aziraphale? _Where?_ Explain it to me, how is  _that_ better than leaving.’

Abruptly, Aziraphale puts away his glass, knocking over something on the table. He pays it no mind. He’s staring at Crowley with eyes that seem to be burning.

Crowley almost shivers. _Abject terror._

‘So is this you, then,’ Aziraphale says, voice is so dreadfully clear and unyielding compared to Crowley’s incoherent articulations, so whole, ‘defying it all? Or is this you, tempting me?’

There’s something tragic in Aziraphale’s eyes, there has always been. A dissonance, a repression of something instinctual. 

Abruptly, Crowley’s face twists, all involuntary and spasmodic. Suddenly overwhelmed, he buries it in his left hand, now shaking. The other clutches around the glass.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, something so inherently pathetic to it, ‘I’ve never known.’

Silence falls again, cold and indefinite like grief, like the ringing in his ears as he walked out of the bookshop, without aim or axis, without anything. Crowley closes his eyes, breathing unevenly. _Start over._

‘I used to think _I_ did,’ he hears Aziraphale’s voice, still so quiet. ‘You’ve … you’ve made me doubt.’

‘Ah,’ Crowley says, swallowing. ‘I _am_ sorry. If you can believe that.’

‘I do,’ Aziraphale replies, so soft it’s terrible. ‘I _do_ believe you.’

Crowley doesn’t look up, just nods slightly, burrowing his face into his hand and swallowing. He doesn’t look up even at the miscellaneous string of sounds signalling movement, doesn’t acknowledge it until he senses Aziraphale presence closer than it’s probable.

Then a touch: startling. Aziraphale’s hand, very hesitant, brushing the edge of his jaw, cheekbone. Crowley opens his eyes as the angel draws his face up.

Aziraphale is looking at him, focused and attentive, eyes full of something like a question. Crowley swallows. 

‘Angel, I—’ he begins.

Seamlessly, Aziraphale takes off Crowley’s glasses.

Crowley stills. There it is again, that absolute focus, undivided attention: a bright holy expression that is neither grief nor elation, neither trust nor hostility, that is so maddeningly unreadable that he could never dare himself to name it or question its constancy. Self-denial, did he say? So be it, self-denial: constancy in rejection, in principle, in—

‘—I might’ve been _wrong_ ,’ Crowley whispers, hysterically.

Aziraphale silences him with a kiss.

There’s a beat before he can find his senses enough to respond. When he does, it’s instinctive, erratically eager. Uncertain swift hands, grasping at his shirt, elbow, face. Back arching, leg twitching helplessly on the floor. They lose balance, then, almost toppling to the floor, and Aziraphale pulls back with a sharp inhalation.

He is holding Crowley’s face in both hands now, his expression hazy. It’s not until a moment later that Crowley realises the angel is kneeling between his legs. 

‘It didn’t burn,’ he blurts out, dazed enough to forget himself and blink.

‘You didn’t think she meant _literal_ fire,’ Aziraphale says nonsensically, panting. His eyes are still unnaturally bright, but his face is slowly regaining familiarity and expression. 

‘I thought we were both just taking a really big _chance_ ,’ Crowley says, still a little too lightheaded to think.

And there’s something in it all that’s still not quite _right_ , a dreadful ache to the way Aziraphale’s forehead rests against his, to the way his own wandering hands bunch in the starchy ancient fabric of the angel’s shirt. A quiet desperation, a brave attempt to hold back something inevitable.

Pressing his face into the crook of Aziraphale’s neck, Crowley screws his eyes shut. He mutters, ‘Why does this feel so final?’

‘Because I think you _were_ right,’ Aziraphale whispers, and Crowley can feel his lips move, forming words, against his hair. Warm breath, warmer voice. ‘The world hasn’t ended. There’s a price. There is always a price. Alive and dead, both, at the same time. It would be too—too _easy_ , otherwise.’

Silent, Crowley nods. ‘Not over, then. There’s … more.’

He considers the probability of Aziraphale taking him by the hands and pulling to his feet from the floor, of letting himself be led across his own flat, towards his own bedroom. Considers taking the initiative: uneasy and un-straightforward as ever but knowing his aim now.

Or stumbling together, perpetually entwined, aiming in the general common direction.

‘Yes,’ Aziraphale breathes out, and his voice disperses the vigilant silence like the warm rain still falling outside. ‘But not until the morning.’

 

_Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song,_

_Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long._

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can. can u tell i’m going through something
> 
> i hope it wasn't too terrible. i’d like to thank misters auden and eliot for giving me all my 3 feelings i proceeded to hurt by considering the grief and guilt and love that could be derived from this here scenario
> 
> please talk to me, i am lowkey intimidated by my inbox here but i’m trying to be better!!!!! i am!!!!!!! i am also desperate for love


	2. what the thunder said

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _‘Damn you,’ Aziraphale whispers, pulling him closer._
> 
> _‘Already done,’ Crowley says, almost laughing._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> charlie day voice: COTTAGE?

_Then spoke the thunder_

_DA_

_Datta: what have we given?_

_My friend, blood shaking my heart_

_The awful daring of a moment’s surrender_

_Which an age of prudence can never retract_

_By this, and this only, we have existed_

**_I._ **

 

It’s still Ritz when he first voices it, all still fresh and dizzying, his voice thin and warmed on the champagne, the usual nervous tremor of his hands nearly gone.

‘We should … stay closer to each other.’ And the words taste odd, tangy like red wine instead of their expected sweetness, heavy. ‘We should live together.’ 

‘Oh,’ Aziraphale says, and smiles. Everything is softened, swaying just a little, and so is him: a bright face, an almost achingly fond smile. Everything  _now_ is all the times before, strung together: cities and collisions, and recurring moments of mutual … kindness?  No, a _ffection_. Maybe he can name it now, if he’s allowed to.

‘Yes, that would be …’ Aziraphale trails off, visibly hazy. ‘That would be _lovely_.’ 

In a flash of sudden and terrible sobriety, Crowley tenses, twitching like a leaf. He looks away, scans the bright room, and breathes in slowly, trying to avoid looking at Aziraphale and getting sidetracked with putting too much faith in his alcohol-indulgent allowances.

At last, sharp and vulnerable, uttered into the air with eyes still fixed somewhere abstract, he manages, ‘Come live with me, then.’

Aziraphale’s prolonged silence tells him he has been heard at last. After a while, the angel enunciates, not quite sober yet but startlingly careful. ‘In ... Mayfair?’ 

‘No, somewhere else. Somewhere else.’ Crowley looks down, speaking in this funny strained way that masks the most labile emotion with something that borders with apathy. ‘Countryside, maybe. Somewhere quieter. South Downs?’

‘In a—cottage?’ Aziraphale says, voice quieter now and audibly confused. It’s endearing. ‘Out of the city?’ 

With heroic consistency, which only now slowly stars to become unnerving, Crowley nods earnestly, and forces himself to raise his head.

Then he declares, meek and casual, and watches Aziraphale’s eyes turn clear and wide awake in matter of seconds, ‘A garden would be nice.’

The angel blinks, something like emotion parting his lips before he composes himself.

‘... Alright,’ he says at last, very quiet.

Crowley nods once more to the accompaniment of the raging noise of blood pulsing in his ears and doesn’t breach the topic any further throughout dinner lest he spontaneously combust.

 

* * *

 

The victory is short-lived, as any mind-numbing euphoria has a right to be. No more than an hour goes by, and he feels like he’s walking on a threadbare cord, eyes closed, balancing precariously over a void.

It’s uncannily warm for Autumn in London, sharp sunlight speckling the world with hazy mirages of light through dense-knitted blue-grey clouds, slanting off tall bright tenements. It’s drizzling, too, a warm English rain, the air strangely breathable. 

‘You really down for it?’ Crowley hears his own voice, almost foreign through all the layers of sheer murdering nerves. They’ve walked, mostly without interruption, to the very door of Aziraphale’s shop, exchanging nothing but wholly inconsequential remarks on the way. ‘ _Fraternising?_ ’ 

For a moment, Aziraphale seems at a loss, with his clear eyes wide and hair curling around his hair more than usually due to humidity, ensconced in the picturesque arch of his bookshop’s entrance. Then his expression steels.

‘Oh, you’re being unfair again, bringing up old ... matters like this,’ he says reproachfully, turning to unlock the door and missing Crowley flinch visibly at the words. 

‘Fair?’ he repeats, hoarsely. ‘This is not—I’m trying to be _honest_ here, angel. Asking an honest question.’

His voice breaks on the vowel, again. The momentary silence, filled with the gentle staccato of rain, is loud and swathing. Aziraphale’s lids flutter slightly as he opens his mouth.

‘Then you tell me, _honestly_ ,’ he says at last, not raising his eyes and not moving from his spot, one soft hand still on the doorknob as though prepared for flight, ‘what do _you_ expect to hear from me? I already said _yes_ , to your ... original question.’

And right there, it is, _cor cordium_ of Crowley’s heartache: an angel’s kindness. 

Quiet, extended so seamlessly to his unworthy begging hands. Something tight and ice-cold crawls into his throat, clawing. 

‘I don’t _expect_ anything,’ he spits out, humiliated. ‘I wish, I bloody _wish_ , for once you showed—’

Aziraphale looks up sharply.

‘—you care,’ Crowley finishes weakly, half-defiant half-miserable. ‘That _you_ care.’

The angel’s face twists. He looks down, again with this bewildered half-flutter of eyes.

‘I said I’ll _live_ with you,’ he says helplessly, softer than he ought to after something as ridiculous. Hesitant. Crowley clenches his jaw.

‘Right,’ he says, trying hard not to sound dejected. ‘Yeah. You did.’ 

‘Crowley, _heavens_ ,’ Aziraphale adds after a pause, looking physically uncomfortable. He’s staring off into the distance: a well-known street coiling somewhere deeper into London. His well-known eyes are bright and _tragic_ : old trick or old evasion. Perhaps a small mercy, if it saves him from saying what he really means and Crowley from _hearing_ it.

Perhaps it’s again, kindness. 

Tortured, Crowley waits even so. The drizzling wind is tousling his hair, almost deafening, until Aziraphale asks, ‘What else do you _want_ me to do?’

And that’s, maybe, difference enough.

Feeling that his heart might wrest itself from its shoddy cage if he doesn’t, Crowley answers, ‘I want you to be certain.’

It might be the mercurial light playing tricks with him, scattered in wind and rain, but he thinks he _sees_ Aziraphale shiver. Closing his eyes, the angel whispers, ‘You said _you_ aren’t. Back in your flat, you said _you don’t know_.’ 

There’s a moment of silence before Crowley speaks, and even _then,_ it’s difficult, word by word: each heavy and slow as thought pulled forcibly from inside him.

‘That’s _different,’_ he says, stilted almost as though he were reciting it. ‘Don’t you see how it’s different?’

Aziraphale stares at him for a long moment, eyes wide and guileless, then shakes his head, minutely so. He pushes the door open with his right hand. 

Cold panic seizes Crowley, numbing reason.

‘Wait,’ and there it is, _desperation_. He feels himself surge forward, his own shaking hand clutching on the angel’s shoulder, pulling him back, ‘wait. I’m saying it all wrong, I just. I want you to _want_ it. All that this entails. All of it.’

 _Me_ , he doesn’t say, but it saves him from nothing. 

Aziraphale looks at him: how odd to find him slightly taller now, and so eerily bright with the way light settles around him. He reaches down to lightly touch his cheek and Crowley breathes in, sharply, through his nose, leaning in despite best effort.

‘You _know_ you don’t need to worry about that,’ Aziraphale says, voice pinched.

‘Then maybe I’m saying it all wrong again,’ Crowley whispers, the last of his reason’s voice—the last of his defences, maybe—thinning in the wind, ‘maybe what I’m trying to say is, I don’t want you to hate it that you do.’ 

He can _feel_ Aziraphale stiffen.

Silence falls, long and again so loud with the wind and rain, but Crowley doesn’t perceive it. Slowly, mechanically, he swallows and steps down, backwards, onto the wet pavement, the soles of his boots dragging across wet concrete.

Aziraphale lowers his hand, uncertain like his skin burns, too, with an urge to reach back or follow. Crowley smothers the thought. There’s something in his throat he can’t quite swallow.

‘I see,’ he says at last, quietly, nodding. His mouth tastes like ash. Aziraphale looks guilty again, and _sad_ , but Crowley has no stomach for it. ‘I see. Well. No worries. I’ll see you tomorrow, we’ll _see_ each other tomorrow. Have a … have a good night, Aziraphale.’

And perhaps the angel stands frozen in the half open door, staring after Crowley walking away with uneven imprecise steps he so ardently lies to himself are only a sign of irreverence.

But perhaps not.

  

**II.**

  

_Dayadhvam: I have heard the key_

_Turn in the door once and turn once only_

_We think of the key, each in his prison_

_Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison_

_Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours_

_Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus_

 

 

Nothing happened that night, in Crowley’s apartment.

They stayed in the eerie living room, Aziraphale sitting on the couch with Crowley’s head on his knees, running nervous fingers rhythmically through his soft dark hair in deep, overwhelming terror. 

Nothing.

 

* * *

 

The journey to the South Downs is smooth, in the sense that a deep sense of familiarity—stretching from Crowley’s reckless driving to the male voice howling from the Blaupunkt in his revived hell-car—forcefully stifles any and all other worry. Aziraphale finds himself fully focused on desperately trying to keep both of them in their respective corporations.

The Conversation isn’t revisited. 

It isn’t until Crowley swerves into a wobbly path cutting across a field towards a small building shielded with trees that it _gets_ to Aziraphale what exactly is _happening_. A mild sense of disembodied panic accompanies him as he watches Crowley get out of the car and walk up to the green-painted gate in long strides.

‘Nice garden,’ Crowley says faintly, stretching his neck to peer inside through the metal bars. ‘Bit wild.’

‘Is the house there?’ Aziraphale says nervously, fumbling to get out of the car as well without stepping on something potentially hiding in the tall grass.

‘What—of _course_ the house is there, did you expect it to evaporate? I even— _oh_.’

‘What is it?’ Aziraphale asks tensely, approaching Crowley who is crouching in the grass, squinting at something low in the shrubbery. 

‘There’s raspberries,’ Crowley says, a strange delight in his voice. ‘Aw, someone must’ve seeded them ages ago and they never quite died out …’

Disregarding him, Aziraphale tries to look inside the garden through the gate. The house—or cottage—seems to _be_ there, with stony steps leading up to the green door and soft moss tinging the slanting black roof tiles.

‘I think we should have a look inside the house,’ Aziraphale says, firmly. 

Crowley straightens. He holds out his hand to Aziraphale, palm full of the small dark red fruit. Met with Aziraphale’s doggedly uncomprehending eyes, he sighs, stuffs all the raspberries in his mouth and kicks the gate open with one long leg, heedless of the angel’s involuntary groan of protest. 

He strays inside, looking curiously around, and Aziraphale follows.

 

* * *

 

Nothing happened _that_ night, but it did promise to happen later. Aziraphale thinks he’d perhaps rather it came as a revelation or thunder, shocking and significant, but that’s not the truth no matter how he tries to bend it.

It comes, instead, with Crowley standing among the unpacked boxes they miracle inside the house, in the slowly falling dawn, reaching up to pat the wooden arch of the door. ‘Good build,’ he says approvingly, swivelling on his heel. Aziraphale watches him stray from corner to corner, long raspberry-stained fingers dragging past walls and plucking at cabinet doors, smoothening out fabrics, feeling something frightening and expansive come alive in his chest.

Crowley strays back, then, to join him at the window to the garden. For a moment, Aziraphale can’t bear looking at _him_ at all: merely the awareness of his physical presence, so _close_ , is enough to nearly lose his senses. 

‘It _is_ a nice garden,’ Crowley mutters, leaning on one hand he props on the windowsill and peering outside through the half-penetrable old glass. His cheek brushes past Aziraphale’s shoulder, torturously not deliberate. Something in this, such an innocuous calculated invitation, pushes Aziraphale to draw Crowley’s head sideward and kiss him on the mouth, decisive.

He offers no resistance, confirming what Aziraphale has suspected: of all casualty being merely pretence. And, impossibly conscientious in the end, he even asks, dutifully as though to spare Aziraphale something, ‘Come to bed?’

Neutral and unguarded like it’s not the question Aziraphale has waited for, sick with anticipation, ever since the night when he’s recited Auden at him wine-drunk and hostile with desperation.

‘Damn you,’ Aziraphale whispers, pulling him closer.

‘Already done,’ Crowley says, almost laughing.

 

* * *

 

Lying, twined into a bundle of limbs, in a shapeless patch of light on white sheets, Crowley sleeps. 

Nothing outright _soft_ about him, not even caught this unaware, not even in fine detail: stray wisps of dark red hair falling into the eyes and strewn on the pillow which he gathers to himself with lean arms and pale long hands. Sharp slant of his nose, eyes pressed closed as though with stubborn care, face and half-tucked into the fabric. Bony ankles crossed, bony knees pulled up to his chest.

Not soft, then. _Brittle_.

A page of Aziraphale’s book, spread open, sways in the air and falls, soft yellowed paper yielding quietly to gravity. He pays it no mind. He’s caught, near breathless, in the harrowing act of watching. Watching for something, language or clue, something that was overlooked and disregarded for time long enough it stretched into thin vague straits, weaving a shroud from behind which only shapes could be guessed at.

A birds thrashes outside the window: soft noise and a rapid scattering of lights strewn across Crowley: he doesn’t stir. Aziraphale watches the dust tremble in the air by the grey fabric of his T-shirt, the tips of hair moved by the air coming in through drafty windows. He watches for change and change comes: yellow eyes, opening slowly, unfocused and distant. Crowley stares ahead, bleary, quiet, for an indeterminate minute or second.

Aziraphale says nothing. Crowley closes his eyes.

 

* * *

 

When it becomes bright, he dresses in a hurry, with clumsy fingers and a feeling inside him that is as insistent as it is unbearable when thought upon.

With no clear purpose or aim, he gets out into the garden, checks that the Bentley is in place, parked in the shadow of the shed, picks up the milk and newspaper bundle from the gate, looking around in hectic apprehension. _Who brought them?_ Who knows, so _soon_ , that someone is to live there, that _they_ are to live here? Is it a gesture of kindness—or an invocation for a proper introduction being overdue—or maybe it’s Crowley, making acquaintances with the local inhabitants while Aziraphale arranged his books in the resin-heavy air inside? Crowley making small thoughtful miracles to make _something_ easier.

Suddenly lightheaded, Aziraphale swallows. He remains at the gate for a long while, breathing unevenly, staring vacantly at the open field outside of it, the dark backdrop of the forest behind it.

 

* * *

 

He sets the table for breakfast outside, simply because he desperately wants to avoid seeing the unmade sheets on the bed from the little table in the dining nook. 

To his credit, Crowley doesn’t try to kiss him in the morning, merely appearing in the kitchen, vaguely bleary, to snag the mug of coffee Aziraphale has left out for him on the counter, miraculously warm despite waiting. 

No, all he does is linger in the doorway to the kitchen, watching Aziraphale scurry around fixing breakfast, without saying much of anything. Aziraphale washes his hands off the raspberries he’s picked and brought in, wipes them on a piece of cloth. He turns to Crowley, continuing a line of monologue he pays only a minuscule fraction of his attention to, ‘It’s not a matter of logic, it’s a matter of avoiding cognitive dissonance. To them, there will have been no end of the world, not until a new one seems probable comes.’

Crowley sets down his mug and nods, eyes strangely pensive. Perceptive? Oh, better _not_ , Aziraphale. thinks, shivering. 

He said, voice barely more vocal than a murmur, ‘Should watch out for that one, too.’

Lazily, he snaps his fingers and the breakfast tray disappears from Aziraphale’s hands. A disoriented second later, he hears the muffled clatter of it landing on the table on the veranda.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Aziraphale says, reproachfully, and Crowley rolls his eyes with a little too much theatrics for it to be truly worrying.

And yet it’s only then, and only after he walks outside, that it strikes Aziraphale he’s not wearing his glasses.

 

* * *

 

‘I like your linens,’ Crowley mutters, voice conversational, nearly causing Aziraphale to choke on his tea. It’s maddening, especially when coupled with the hazy nondescript look the demon is giving the teapot between them. ‘ _Very_ good quality.’ 

‘Lithuanian,’ Aziraphale replies carefully, trying not to drop his cup from his suddenly burning hands and merely set it gently down. ‘From that time—’

‘Oh, _right_ ,’ Crowley says absently, stuffing a piece of scone in his mouth. ‘After Prussia. Nice touch. I usually go for silk but this is more organic. Fits the vibe.’

‘I _do_ admire your constancy in devotion to aesthetics,’ Aziraphale says weakly. He closes his eyes; his head hurts from tension. 

‘Kettle, pot?’ Crowley snipes, but it’s far from unkind. When Aziraphale looks up, his eyes are crinkling in the corners, a sight so rare lately it drives him mildly breathless. ‘I like your _bathrobe_ as well, Mr Fell. _Very_ retired nobleman residing in the countryside. Watch out for getting married off to someone’s dowry-lacking daughter.’

‘Wrong era,’ is what Aziraphale finds himself saying. 

‘You _notice_ that?’ Crowley asks in amusement, miracling himself more coffee with another snap of fingers.

Aziraphale sighs, trying to mask _flustered_ with _weary_ , and feeling it’s only half-successful. ‘We could go on like that, you know,’ he says weakly.

Crowley grins now, fuller than he has since Ritz, or maybe _even_ St. James. ‘We _could_.’ 

But he doesn’t stir up much of anything else till they finish off breakfast—Crowley eating considerably less than the angel, and with effort that would be worrying were Aziraphale even a fraction less preoccupied with _different_ matters—instead burying his nose in the newspaper.

‘I think I’ll try and arrange the books today,’ Aziraphale finds himself saying, testing the waters. ‘Do you have anything specific in mind, my d—ah, dear boy?’ 

Seemingly missing Aziraphale’s fateful wavering, Crowley hollows out one cheek, squinting at the paper.

‘Garden,’ he says at last, cryptically.

‘Ah, yes, _right_ ,’ Aziraphale says, at a loss. He feels like he’s missed something, or let something escape him, and led the conversation in a direction less favourable than it—possibly— _could_ have gone.

‘Mm,’ Crowley mutters, absent.

When disappears into the tool shed, Aziraphale finds himself torn between an exhalation of relief and a deep, irrational longing he feels almost immediately in his absence. _Hypocrite_ , he thinks, bashful. 

It strikes him belatedly that Crowley has seemed, initially at least, rather at ease with things. Content? Perhaps merely _calm_ , which, in a way, was even stranger than seeing him smile.

 

* * *

 

Later, trying to convince himself the _lack_ he perceives is just worry—not exactly baseless, either, given Crowley’s inclination towards auto-destruction, Aziraphale abandons his meticulous _catalogue-and-shelf_ system and sets out to find him.

And find him he does, in the frail-looking greenhouse on the ascension behind the cottage, sitting huddled on an overturned fruit box and sieving through three separate bags of seeds. 

Seating himself carefully on a stool opposite to Crowley and occupying his hands with one of the bizarre gardening tools strewn haphazardly about everywhere, Aziraphale tries to collect his thoughts.

‘Do you … do you not _hate_ it?’ he asks at last, sounding almost strangled. ‘Feeling … attached? It goes—quite against your instincts, doesn’t it. And I’m not trying … to be insensitive here, I just keep wondering …’

Articulate as ever, Crowley shrugs one shoulder, effectively shutting Aziraphale up.

‘I used to hate _myself_ for it,’ he mutters, still plucking the seeds. ‘But that’s true of many things.’

He says no more, reaching down to reshuffle one of the bags of seeds, scooting it closer with one foot, then returning to his—seemingly at least—hopelessly dreary task.

A minute passes, in suffocating silence.

‘I can’t comprehend how you can … be so _at ease_ with this,’ Aziraphale blurts out, unable to stop himself. ‘If I’m being honest, I almost … I almost envy it.’

At this, Crowley does finally look up from his seeds. He stares ahead, past Aziraphale. When he speaks out, his tone seems uncharacteristically candid. 

‘No, it’s not … that. I’m not. Or I _wasn’t_. It’s just,’ he breaks off. 

In a suddenly vulnerable gesture, he raises one pale long-fingered hand and rubs at his left eye.

Hoarsely, he finishes, ‘I’m tired.’

Of all things, this is perhaps the last Aziraphale could have expected.

‘Tired?’ he echoes, faintly.

As though with difficulty, Crowley looks directly at him, squinting slightly in the light. For the first time, Aziraphale sees, really _sees_ , how deep the dark circles under his dulled uncovered eyes are, how sunken his narrow face. 

‘Yeah,’ Crowley says plainly, still so bizarrely monotone. ‘It’s been … a _while_ , Aziraphale. And you can … only hate yourself for something that’s been with you so long _for so long._ Yeah, I’m … I’m tired. I don’t know. It all very nearly went up in flames, I guess I just … don’t have the energy anymore. I’ve stopped fighting it.’

Watching him, head so full of questions, none of which can be put in words, Aziraphale says nothing.

‘So maybe you’re right,’ Crowley mutters at length, returning to his seeds. ‘Maybe this is actually me being … I don’t know. It does all feel calmer now. Quieter.’

‘How …’ Aziraphale begins at last, feeling dizzy and ashamed at the same time, maybe dizzy with shame, clutching at the pliers in his hand as though to squeeze them even _more_ shut. ‘How long?’ 

Crowley tenses, but doesn’t stop working. ‘You don’t want to know,’ he says curtly.

Aziraphale’s heart stutters, once.

‘And you couldn’t—’ he breaks off, not knowing what he’s wanted to say _. Tell me?_ Ah, but hasn’t he _tried_ , awkward and confusing and inherently _Crowley_ as it was. _Guide me into it?_ But how to guide someone who won’t let himself know he’s even travelling? _Help me accept it?_  

‘What, tell you?’ Crowley says, dully. ‘I don’t … really think it would’ve made a difference.’

For some reason inexplicable even to himself, Aziraphale finds that the notion hurts. 

‘How on earth would that _not_ make a difference?’ he demands, agitated.

Crowley looks at him again, but this time it’s reluctant. Pained, even. 

‘It’s—you struggle with all this _now_ ,’ he says at last, ‘and for the longest time I didn’t think it was anything but me, being selfish and awful, as I always am. It wouldn’t’ve made a difference. Or it would’ve, for the worse.’

Aziraphale swallows. _Is it so illogical?_ Suddenly to have it embodied: if you _tell_ and are _listened_ to, your words grow roots in the consciousness you address.

 _You told him_ , thinks Aziraphale, _to convince yourself it was true. One of you believed it._

‘You’re neither of those things,’ he now says, weakly. 

Crowley shrugs again, looking. ‘I am.’

With mounting helplessness, Aziraphale notes he hasn’t seen Crowley shrug _quite_ this often in literal millennia. Hazy, frustrated, he gets up and walks down the path leading out into the garden, aiming to shelter himself in the house, try and compose himself in solitude. 

Unexpectedly, Crowley looks up from his work.

‘ _Quo vadis,_ angel?’ he says swiftly, and underneath the sarcasm, Aziraphale hears something alarmingly vulnerable that causes him to almost lose his balance.  ‘Have I said too much?’

Fighting an instinct to flee, he turns around and walks back to Crowley. Standing in front of him, Aziraphale reaches down, draws his chin up and kisses him on the forehead.

 _Forgive me,_ he thinks, _forgive me, forgive me. I don’t know how to say it, I don’t know how to do it, I’m a fool._

Crowley’s eyes are closed when Aziraphale withdraws. Swallowing, he mutters ‘Kissing disease.’ 

Aziraphale flinches. Steps back.

‘Must you,’ he says, tightly, even though guilt is hammering in his chest now, heart brimming, and burning in each vein. _It’s what you deserve, old delusional bastard_ , a voice in his head says, and still at the same time he wants to blame Crowley, he wants it to be clear that— 

Crowley shrugs, looking at him. His eyes are bright, open and unnerving.

‘Maybe I _must_ ,’ he says, as though reading his mind again. 

Almost shivering, Aziraphale turns and walks away.

He hears an echo of Crowley’s words, seemingly ages away, _I want you to be certain._

 

* * *

 

‘What’s all this, then?’ Aziraphale asks, helpless.

He’s mulled the whole thing over the whole day, the whole trip to the neighbouring town, picking fruit in the market, absently responding to polite curious questions of polite curious humans.

 _What good is religion_ , Aziraphale thinks, tragically _, if it collapses under calamity._

 _And_   _what_ is _my religion? A belief? If I believe him over them, and I do, that renders everything I claimed to stand by worthless. A certainty? I don’t remember being certain._

Now, upon having returned, he stands clutching at his fruit basket and thinks he might be yet immersed in some strange and devious fever dream.

Crowley’s sitting on the lowest step, bony knees pulled to his chest among tall unruly grass, holding a dirty spade in the tips of the fingers of one gloved hand and cradling an opened bottle of red wine to himself with the other. He’s staring ahead with hazy unnaturally bright eyes, his beekeeper’s hat crooked. 

Ahead of him, between the two of them, a small, brittle-looking plant is sitting on a small mound of fresh soil.

Half-incongruous, smiling a very crooked smile, Crowley says, ‘Apple tree.’

 _That_ , Aziraphale supposes, _is undeniable_.

Then, _in the name of God, why did I leave him here alone._

Schooling himself into any semblance of stoicism he can muster while this profoundly unsettled, he ventures, ‘Will you … come in? We could have dinner, perhaps.’ 

Crowley doesn’t move, just blinks owlishly, eyes still fixed ahead. ‘D’you want me to?’

‘Oh, for god’s sake,’ Aziraphale snaps, and then stops himself. Frustration _won’t_ help it. Straightening, he says, carefully, ‘ _Yes_.’ 

Crowley nods. He tosses the spade into the grass and stands up, stretching tall and swaying slightly on his long legs, then taking a swig out of his bottle. Brimming with quite undeserved impatience, Aziraphale watches each of his movements like a hawk, trying to somehow quell his mounting distress.

‘Be right there,’ Crowley mumbles, not looking at Aziraphale at all. ‘Just need to check up on _sssomething_.’

And without much more do, he saunters away into the orchard, holding the bottle precariously by its neck between two fingers.

Everything in what he does screams to Aziraphale something desperate.

He rushes towards the house.

 

* * *

 

Crowley is very easy to kiss, turns out, with a soft eager mouth, wandering hands and a dizzying sort of determination in responses. He’s easy to _touch_ , too, touch into an absolute pliancy, coming around slowly in the mornings, from bone-deep inertia.

Aziraphale has never expected it. He isn’t sure what he _has_ expected, in the rare times he’s dared imagine, but it was nothing quite like this. Nothing quite this ... 

Easy. It’s surprisingly easy. It’s terrifying, after decades of telling yourself it would be so very hard, ill-received and punished. Wrong.

None of it feels wrong. Nothing, except the odd downwards tilt of Crowley’s smile when he catches Aziraphale looking at him in the mornings and ducks his head.

But he can’t blame _this_ on Crowley, can he.

Crowley inhales, loud and laboured, staring at the ceiling. He sounds bleary, and annoyed, ‘Have you been _watching_ me sleep?’ 

‘You sleep too _much_ ,’ Aziraphale responds brusquely, before he can stop himself. Slowly, still stretched out on the bed, Crowley turns his to look at him. His eyes are a bright yellow, cloudy and unfocused as they tend to be early post-awakening. 

‘What’s it to you?’ he mutters, frowning and blinking to focus. He runs a hand through his hair, rubs his face. Props himself on one elbow.

Swallowing, Aziraphale straightens the pile of papers he has spread out on the table. It’s odd to find his hands trembling.

‘It unnerves me,’ he says finally, curtly. ‘It’s not … _right_.’

‘ _Not right?_ ’ Crowley echoes, disbelieving. His eyes are narrowed now. ‘What are you, a leaflet for healthy circadian patterns? I’ll sleep when I bloody want to—’

‘You wanted to _live_ ,’ Aziraphale cuts in, slow and deliberate, well aware he sounds desperate and that his right to this desperation is questionable at best, ‘and yet you want to stay unconscious through it so badly.’

From the way Crowley stills, he knows he’s hit the right spot. 

For a moment, neither of them speaks.

‘How touching,’ Crowley says at last, stymied but still stingingly caustic. ‘You _do_ miss me after all.’

‘It _is_ as though I live alone for the most part,’ Aziraphale says, waspish. No need to be meek, not here.

Crowley looks at him blankly for a while, then laughs. It sounds hollow, and more than a little hysterical. 

‘Isn’t that a good thing? I’m _easing you in_ ,’ he says, voice high-pitched and airy. Then, ‘You can always _join_ me, you know. It’s nice, sleeping. It’s a nice thing. And it’s not like it’s _me_ kicking you out every morning lest I have to face up to the night in the sober light of day. Or _is_ it.’ 

For a moment, Aziraphale finds himself speechless. Crowley is still staring at the ceiling. He doesn’t look particularly triumphant.

‘An eye for an eye, old _friend,_ ’ he says, dully. ‘We all have our own ways of coping.’

 

* * *

 

It begins raining in the afternoon, and doesn’t stop for hours on end. Throwing one last sullen look at his carrot patches, Crowley finally lets himself be herded inside by Aziraphale, but only _after_ getting threatened with having to sleep in the shed if he doesn’t listen.

Unbeknownst to Aziraphale, all it does is make matter worse.   

 

* * *

 

Sometime after finding Crowley asleep, mid-rainy-day, curled on the ladder to the attic, limbs tangled together like a ball of dark yarn, his shovel propped against the wall, the sensation of helplessness Aziraphale has developed grows expansive and mind-numbing, coming in tidally and leaving him lost. 

Sometime after _that_ , he steps out of the kitchen where he’s tried futilely to localise the moth hive— _hive? nest? burrow?_ —and ended up merely brewing tea for them both, and finds Crowley in bed.

He’s sitting propped against the wall, all limbs vaguely askew as usually, one knee in the air, one long leg outstretched, barefoot in soft cotton pants, lacking, as he now tends to, his glasses. He’s eating an apple. Reading a book. 

It’s then that the feeling inside Aziraphale grows so monstrous and loud that for a moment he has trouble remembering how to _speak_. He holds on to the two mugs with suddenly violently shaking hands, and tries to calm himself, to no avail.

Then, of all things, the _stupidest_ one could conceive of, ‘So you _do_ read.’

Crowley looks up at him with something like alarm, yellow eyes almost comically wide. Then he frowns, or winces, or something in between, ‘ _Really_ , angel? _So I do read_ —the hell is that?’

‘I—’ coming to his senses enough that he can safely attempt walking, Aziraphale places one of the cups on the night stand by Crowley’s side, ‘never mind.’

‘Never mind?’ Crowley echoes, still in mild disbelief, but Aziraphale has by then disappeared back into the kitchen.

 

* * *

 

At night, rain comes to storm.

At dawn, when it quietens, Aziraphale leaves his table and sinks to the floor, the copy of _Crime and Punishment_ he’s been pretending to read lying on the floor, his back resting against the side of the bed. 

He tries to decide whether he’s seeking comfort in physical nearness _or_ trying to listen for Crowley’s breathing, and which of them would be the less pathetic of options.

‘Oh,’ he hears Crowley’s voice, unexpected, sleep-heavy. ‘So _this_ is your idea of taking another step.’ 

‘Crowley,’ Aziraphale says quietly. Crowley snorts.

‘Alright then,’ he mutters.  ‘Kneel by my bed and atone all you want. I think I’ll go have a look at the greenhouse, it seems to have stopped raining at last.’ 

‘You’re reading into it,’ Aziraphale says weakly, at the sound of sheets rustling signalling Crowley means it. ‘You’re being—’ 

‘Unfair?’ Crowley deadpans, and oh, _that_ is heavy. ‘Okay. Okay, I take the blame.’

Aziraphale stares at the floor between his knees. ‘Crowley, what do you _want_ from me?’

There’s a moment of empty silence before Crowley speaks.

‘See, Aziraphale, I think it’s what I _don’t_ want,’ he says, and Aziraphale is not brave enough to raise his eyes at him. ‘And I don’t particularly want to be your heresy.’ 

The wooden frame of the bed cuts into his back, between the shoulder blades, uncomfortable like kneeling, and he’s suddenly acutely ashamed, for a reason vastly different than what Crowley suggested. 

Crowley continues, evenly, entirely hollow. ‘I don’t want to be your last forbidden thought when it’s dark and no one listens. Perhaps that’s surprising. But I don’t.’ 

He says nothing even when Crowley swings his long legs across the edge of the bed, gets up staggeringly and walks away, into the shadow of the house. 

‘You’re not,’ Aziraphale whispers, into the stillness of the air. Not even the mice answer.

  

* * *

 

Bad comes to worse, Aziraphale decides, when Crowley starts sleeping in the garden. 

All of the sudden it’s him waking up alone, early at dawn, and rising in choking alarm, stumbling to the window only to see—

Crowley, deep asleep in the wan misty light of the morning, spread out long and thin in a linen hammock hung between the spruce and a nail hammered into the wall of the tool shed.

Guilt, anger, a little longing. More guilt. Confusion. And a pressing, embarrassing question, _aren’t you cold._

In desperate need to keep himself busy, Aziraphale shuffles to the kitchen and makes tea, staying there long enough to hear Crowley come home—or come _inside_ , simply—looking stiff and mildly blue-lipped, and docile enough to accept the miracle-warm tea from Aziraphale’s hands without any hostility.

And then, suddenly, it’s _clear._

  

* * *

 

In the afternoon, he finds him again asleep in the hammock. Face smoother in sleep, Crowley looks misleadingly young.

‘Crowley,’ Aziraphale says quietly. Too quietly. Oh, he’s a _coward_.

He touches one of his knees. ‘Crowley.’

He stirs, waking.

‘Angel,’ he croaks, eyes blinking in confusion. 

Aziraphale watches him for a moment, trying to find words good enough to say what he wants to. 

‘I see now,’ he starts.

( _Crowley’s face: pale, nervous, nearly foreign in its stark dejection. Saying, voice hollowed out and rapid, ‘I want you to be certain._ ’)

‘Do you?’ Crowley mutters, either purposefully teasing or still genuinely tired. He raises one hand and rubs at his eye.

‘Anthony,’ Aziraphale says quietly, ‘patron of lost things.’ 

Crowley looks up at him with distrustful, hazy eyes. It might be drowsy still, but it’s shrewd. No, more than that— _knowing_.

‘I _am_ a lost thing,’ he says at length, a little scathing. ‘I’m all the lost things. I’m what happens to a thing when it’s lost. The very state.’

 _I know_ , Aziraphale thinks. _Don’t think you fool me with any of this derision anymore._

‘Can I find you,’ he says instead, ‘inside? It’s going to rain again.’

Snorting quietly, Crowley closes his eyes and smiles, wan but fond. It’s _still_ achingly good to see, and _still_ achingly rare. 

‘What do I even _like_ you for, bloody _hell_ ,’ he mutters. ‘If it rains, it rains. My apple tree needs watering. I’ll keep ‘em company.’

It’s light, mocking, _endlessly_ forgiving, but the shadow is still there, so deep-buried and heavy it constricts Aziraphale’s throat to even recognise it. 

‘I _love_ you,’ Aziraphale says. Crowley’s eyes fly open.

This is the most straightforward way it has ever been said between them, in so many years. This is not playing with fire. It’s shielding it from the rain. 

‘It scares me,’ he goes on, reaching down to stroke a hand through Crowley’s hair and cup his face. It’s a tiny movement, easy to miss, how Crowley leans into it, chasing touch. His eyes are wide open still, wary.

‘But not because I hate it, and not because of who you _are_ ,’ Aziraphale says. ‘It scares me because it’s _selfish_ , and personal, and very, very desperate. It’s different from all I thought I knew, and absolutely _maddening_. It’s all I think about. You. Every day, at all times. I lose my mind.’

He pauses, then inhales sharply. Crowley is still looking at him wide-eyed, as though frozen still. 

‘Come inside,’ Aziraphale says, again.

When Crowley responds, his voice is hoarse, ‘Alright.’

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *wii music* _they both so stupid_
> 
> there’s this intensely erotic poem about picking raspberries in my native language and i’ve been thinking about it the whole time i wrote the scene they came to the cottage. poor crowley probably tried to be smooth
> 
> actually this cottage and its surroundings are probably not what english ones would look like hnnngn but like . bear with me i wanted it to be nice and romantique
> 
> i’m like crowley, i crave spelled-out validation. please talk to me


	3. death by the water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _‘Don’t make me your new religion, Aziraphale.’_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> anyway, i'm still going through something
> 
> it's an odd thing, this chapter, and it's taken whole ages to write, and i'm Still kinda Hm about it cause maybe there's just too many fish in this particular soup so. yeah. doubt.jpg
> 
> but i reread _the Master & Margarita_ and i decided i want to add a little bit more to this
> 
> so here i am, with _more_ and there's still _pining_
> 
> update: i made a spotify playlist! with the things that kept me company while writing.

 

_I sat upon the shore_

_Fishing, with the arid plain behind me_

_Shall I at least set my lands in order?_

_London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down_

_Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina_

_Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow_

_Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie_

_I._

He wakes up at dawn.

There’s a wind, heavy and murmuring, falling into the cottage through drafty windows. The light is murky, half-penetrable, rendering all shapes in distance eerie and unreal.

Briefly, he waits, uncertain — gripped with a suddenly violent wish to stay, burrow his head under Aziraphale’s chin and into his chest, wake him, wrap around him, legs twining with legs, skin recognising skin, so that the angel blinks and cards his hands through his hair, and asks, ‘What is it? Crowley, what is it?’

And Crowley would shiver at his own name and hold on.

No, not today, not now. There have been — _will be_ , if fortune holds — mornings like this, of him resigning himself to own desperation and the need of having it soothed. Not now. Now he has a plan and a strange nervous feeling in his hands, like he is running out of time, like he can only bring it to fruition in this bland half-cold light of the morning.

He allows himself this: a brush of fingers to the side of his cheek, a tiny gesture of anchoring. A small litany, a reminder: _you are here. I wake up, and you are still here._

It’s still such a new thing.

Dragging his fingers away, a feather-light touch, Crowley unstrings himself silently from the angel, extricates limbs from limbs, skin from skin. He slinks out of bed, fluid like a shadow, and walks out barefoot into the veranda. 

He pulls a shirt over his head on the way — coarse linen drags over taut skin, harsh in touch. But he likes the consistency of it, likes teasing Aziraphale about it: the linens, the breakfast cutlery, the embroidered cushion on the windowsill. Small rituals and reinvented habits. He dresses quickly then, efficiently: dark wool, trousers and a loose coat with a hood — more like Jerusalem than anything that has been after — then snaps his fingers and the laces of his boots tie themselves.

Pushing the front door open, Crowley hears the faint shimmer of drizzle, nothing proper enough to be rain yet, just a drowsy scattering of new dew. He lingers at the door, looking at the garden, still deep-green, fast asleep with cold air and crickets. The brittle apple tree, the pear orchard and the greenhouse, and tall wet grass tangling with overgrown raspberry thickets by the fence.

He remembers passing Aziraphale the raspberries and thinking of touching his mouth. 

_(Touch is language._

_And I want a language, Crowley thinks, delirious, only between the two of us. Only here, like this. Even if we can’t speak what we speak here in any other._

_‘Don’t move,’ whispers Aziraphale, touching his face, both sides. Such terrifying attention. For years and years, they took such great stifling care to turn away, only to be looking so intently now, as though to pluck each other open and read, deep down to the beginnings.)_

Exhaling softly, he steps outside into the drizzle.

 

* * *

 

‘Never told me how it was exactly, have you? With your … fall.’

Crowley can pick out a solitary bird, wrapped up somewhere in the foliage of the old trees bending over the fence, trilling its tiny lungs hoarse. The wind is sending the long-curved branches into movement, a soft avalanche of rustling sound, carrying gossamer and lime tree dust, scattering the hazy heavy sunlight of the afternoon on the white-cloth dinner table. It’s set, once again, out in the garden.

Aziraphale’s voice is conversational as he cuts through his rhubarb pie with a precise movement of a silver knife. Slouched to the side in his chair, face tucked into one hand, Crowley watches the movement through half-lidded eyes, focusing most of his attention on the arrhythmic lilt of birdsong, trying to find a pattern to its cadence.

‘Crowley? Are you here, dear?’

The wind picks up.

‘Yes, well,’ he mutters indistinctly, looking up from Aziraphale’s hands into his face, softened with the gauzy light. The tips of his curling hair are lit up, a ruffled dandelion halo. ‘Except I did. Did I not? M’not sure how much you _heard_.’

Aziraphale straightens, hollowing out one cheek and narrowing his blue eyes slightly, ‘I’m sure I’d remember that, my dear,’ he says, still mostly neutral. If not placid.

Crowley holds his gaze — which is anything _but_ neutral, blasted bright sight of the justified — then looks away, wincing minutely. Dust and spider silk comes fluttering with the wind, small puffs stumbling softly into the rim of his abandoned teacup, making the dark liquid ripple. There’s an old black cat, a toothless shedding fleabag, sleeping curled up in his hammock.

He’s wandered into the garden a week prior and refused to leave. Crowley, much to his private dismay, finds himself wretchedly attached.

‘What d’you want to know?’ he now asks, extending his free hand to flick the dust away. He thinks he can hear Aziraphale inhale, bracing himself for the interrogation, even among the persistent birdsong. 

The slight pause before anything is actually spoken tells him the pool of questions is expansive even before Aziraphale sets down his cutlery. Crowley’s eyes find his hands again.

‘Why?’ Aziraphale says, without ceremony. Soft. Still insistent. 

He closes his eyes. _Well, that’s just — baseline, isn’t it?_ Shallow waters. Still, perhaps not, perhaps that’s — that’s the core of it. Maybe that’s the exact thing to know on the way to know Crowley. He nearly smiles, one corner of his mouth stretching up, stubborn i its optimism, even as he still has it pressed into the knuckles of his left hand. He tugs at the ear of the teacup idly. More ripples. He tugs again.

‘Prototypical sin,’ he says mildly, releasing the cup so it clatters on the saucer. ‘Curiosity.’

 

* * *

 

_(Is this, then, the justification? Do I exist to touch you? Do I hurt you? Help you? Was that my purpose? Were my hands made for you? Were my wings made wrong so I would fail and meet you halfway?_

_Are we immune to each other? he thinks, silent, shivering in need. Or do we like the burn of it?)_

He walks down the cliff side, a narrow meandering path cutting through the grass, following a tilted slope: poorly-whittled wooden fence, a sparse cluster of trees. And down the line, small buildings, a road, haggard dark rocks, gritty and sharp-cut, softening into the fumes of milk-grey mist rising over the water. He can hear the water. 

The town is asleep. Nothing much to it, but even at such harsh hour it wouldn’t be strange to meet someone. Fishermen loading green-painted cutters languorously, blinking away exhaustion in yellow oilers, muddled in the mist, accompanied by low-crying seagulls. 

But Crowley is focused: intent and centred, and he takes care _not_ to meet anyone. Giving in to Aziraphale’s unspoken wish, he tends to forgo the safety of his glasses lately. A difficult thing to get used to, appearing uncovered.

He could wear them now, alone, perhaps giving his walk some of his erstwhile well-honed bravado, instead of hurrying down quiet — but he doesn’t want to. He pulls up the woollen hood, treading softly through the docks, hands stinging in the briny cold air; and shadows his face to the off-chance of being seen. 

It’s dead quiet. Only the birds, circling him steadily, and the scruffy black cat belonging to no one, all used to his presence now, a new fixed thing in the plane of their existence. Only the water.

He walks along the docks to the far end. There, looming in the hazy mist, he sees a narrow boathouse. 

 

* * *

 

Aziraphale licks his lips, touches a napkin to one of its corners. ‘Curiosity … regarding?’

‘Why,’ Crowley mutters, narrowing his eyes as he dips his two fingers into his coffee,then draws them away, smudging it on the white table cloth. ‘Mainly. Just … what’s the point.’

Silence from Aziraphale’s side, just the rustling of trees. Or maybe he’s just trying not to pay attention. 

Then, ‘That’s hardly _prototypical_. Wouldn’t that rather be _to harm_?’

‘Then why _let_ harm?’ Crowley counters lazily, then looks up. Aziraphale’s face is focused, as though he’s watching Crowley for clues, traces of something hidden that he doesn’t voice.

‘And why let live?’ he ventures, probing, voice low but steady. ‘Why make and estrange? Why not be, infinitely alone, if all that comes for creation is judgement?’

The wind picks up one of the napkins, sends it flying towards the house. Crowley swallows, feeling oddly hollow.

When he finds words, his voice sounds hollow as well, wan. ‘And you really want to play this game?’

‘I wasn’t aware we were playing one,’ Aziraphale says quietly, eyes bright. ‘I asked you a question.’

‘I _answered_ ,’ Crowley points out meekly, bowing his head. ‘But you’re not _content_ with my answer.’

‘It’s not much of an answer.’

‘You want me to write it down?’ Crowley asks, hoarsely, straining his mouth into a smile. ‘My antithesis to the Holy Word?’

Aziraphale fixes him with that sharp searching look again, then blinks. Looks down, as if abashed, to his hands. He’s fiddling with the napkin, bending it into shapes between soft fingers. Inhaling carefully, he licks his lips.

‘What bothers me is you are hardly —’ there’s _hesitance_ there, Crowley hears, well-known, and still that half-bashful smile persisting, ‘what I would call a prototypical _sinner_ , Crowley.’

At that, Crowley can’t help himself, he smiles. Properly, all involuntary, affection-drunk. Resting his weight on both elbows, he leans forwards across the table, staring fondly at Aziraphale — who suddenly seems wary, perhaps of Crowley’s unexpected elation, perhaps of his yet unuttered answer.

‘I am,’ Crowley says, quietly, still smiling. ‘I _really_ am. Doesn’t get more basic than me.’

There's a breathless second in which he thinks the warmth will be reflected, and Aziraphale will smile.

‘Define _sin_ , then,’ Aziraphale says, and suddenly something grows sharper, cutting into unawareness. His eyes are hard, _blue_ on Crowley’s face. He must sense his tensing, too, because he presses, insistent ‘ _You_ define it. You tell me what it … what you see it as.’

Crowley closes his eyes, feeling the momentary stability elude him. ‘Curiosity.’

‘No.’

He winces, looking to the left. The old cat has woken up, smacking the pristine linen of the hammock with its tattered tail, blinking yellow eyes accusingly at the table. Crowley braces himself.

‘Doubt, then,’ he says stiffly, choosing words with deliberation that’s genuinely uncanny, ‘if we’re playing semantics …’

‘ _No_.’ He feels, _feels_ the angel’s eyes on his skin. This is new, too, this unnerving strange ... awareness. New, and physical, entirely.

Is he seen so thoroughly, too? Is he _sensed?_

The feeling that comes to him, then, is sleep-heavy and well-worn, easy to retrace in the usually-cold hollow of his ribcage. It’s been less frequent as of late, as of this week, as of latest hours. He’s been feeling — warmer.

Frail distractions. Crowley stares after the shadows of leaves on the table, not smiling anymore.

‘Hate,’ he says, weakly. The cold gathers.

 

* * *

 

The inside is dim and quiet, the light earthy, shut in the carious greyed wood. Crouching down, he starts working on the ropes — unhurried but efficient with nimble long fingers, he throws the loose end over his shoulder and unties his boots. Shucking them into the boat, he pulls up his trouser legs and waddles into the water: cold, saline in scent, biting the skin. Crowley pushes at the boat with the weight of his inconspicuous human body, only swinging himself inside when the bow cuts out into the vague brightness outside.

_(Because the original aim was —_

__—_ the aim is —_

_—to move fast. To stifle the terrible perception. Move fast or sleep (_ don’t move _, he'd said.) So it hurts less. (easy to say.)_

_It doesn’t hurt less. Fire is everywhere, and it fills the absence with a whimper.)_

The boat moves with no aid of wind or arms, drifting steadily, carried by a peripheral notion in Crowley’s idle thought stream. He lies on the floor, knees bent to fit his body inside, face upturned to the sky — from here, almost blinding with bland harsh light, something between grey and pink, shrouded with thin clouds.

A gaping wound into Heaven.

Listening to the steady loud rhythm of water crashing into the boat, Crowley closes his eyes, the faint sheen of phosphenes staining his unseeing vision bright. 

 

* * *

 

There’s a silence again from Aziraphale, but this one seems kinder, more hospitable  _—_ if only marginally. He still _doesn’t_ look up lest he sees pity, even if logic tells him he shouldn’t fear it. Not here, not from _him_.

‘You don’t hate, Crowley,’ Aziraphale speaks out his verdict, all soft-voiced, and the cold feeling in Crowley’s chest unravels and escapes its careful holding.

‘No,’ he says, barely even a sound.

He doesn’t know what to do with this, this hollow space inside his consciousness. He’s never known. Attempt after attempt, distraction after distraction, but it always came back, relentless.

A constant fear. 

In many shapes and forms, changing faces and names, the feelings perseveres, achy and unnameable. Something to find, to search for, to balance the coil of anxious doubt and questioning, endlessly harrowing, tremor of nervous dark matter that composes him into a person. Something to look at, look _after_ , to follow, stumbling and ungainly, but follow nevertheless, in vain blind foolish hope of an answer.

A liking for light.

‘Hardly anyone does,’ he says, hoarsely, clutching at the escaping trails of the conversation before he falls further down. ‘When it comes down to it.’ 

A liking for light, an _attachment_ to it.What a wretched word.  A _love_ , then. Of the scared, misguided kind. 

He’d know.

‘I don’t agree,’ Aziraphale says, and his voice is, still, softer than Crowley can currently stomach. To shield himself somehow, he deals him a rather nasty smile over the fruit bowl and the polished teapot. 

_Aziraphale_  is light, mostly.

‘Where’s that certainty from?’ Crowley says, cold and scathing, and leans back in his chair until it presses between the shoulder blades. It’s not much help; his whole body is vibrating. ‘I’m shaped by circumstance. What if you ended up meeting Hastur under that apple tree and he turned out great? Had _jussst_ as much potential.’

Aziraphale has the decency to follow his initially alarmed expression with guilt. ‘I’ll … take your word for it,’ he manages.

Crowley smiles tightly, looking down. He grips one of his knees under the table, drawing a steadying breath through the nose. 

‘You find it so hard to believe, even now,’ he says at last, deflecting as best he can, which is nothing _much_. ‘That — there’s something more to those in Hell than where they landed.’

To his surprise, Aziraphale doesn’t hesitate but merely shakes his head. He seems pensive. 

‘Far from it. I _do_ listen, Crowley, and try as I might, I don’t reject every inconvenient information I am given. It’s just that …’ he gazes into Crowley’s face with a look on his face that is not easily definable, caught sideways through Crowley’s glare. ‘Perhaps I simply reject a world in which _you’re_ not a wonder.’

Crowley blinks, disarmed. 

He searches for words and finds nothing substantial enough to cling to, the hazy coiling feeling in his chest expanding through the nerve endings down to his hands. Always the hands. Ducking his head, he reaches for his coffee, excruciatingly aware of Aziraphale’s eyes following the movement. But he doesn’t look, doesn’t _look_. 

‘I’m — nothing,’ is what finds its way out of his mouth, shapeless and airy. He knows there’s an edge of panic rising in his voice, a slight faltering of pitch. ‘What’s _got_ into you? _Far from it?_ Where’s your thin line between sin and holy ecstasy gone? I remember whole _essays_ —’

‘It’s gone to Hell,’ Aziraphale cuts in. He has his best defiant smile, though it’s by no means confident. 

Crowley swallows. His head is spinning, hands are warm from blood. 

‘So am I, it seems,’ he says hoarsely.

 

* * *

 

Kneeling on the floor of the boat, Crowley throws his head back. The wind sifts through his hair, pulling down the hood. Sunlight is beginning to stream through the mist, warming the upturned skin of his face, though the sky is still not see-through, coiling in veils of thin clouds.

_Perhaps_ , Crowley thinks, _a question can only ever not be harrowing when it is constantly supplied with an answer, leaving no space for the void to fill anything, perhaps that’s the only way doubt goes away._

But that’s not something he can hope for or would dare to demand. Somewhere between Hell and Heaven, there’s the neutral ground, bland like the very light before morning, devoid of taste and senses, purged out of essence. _Purgatorio_ , the land of eternal self-questioning.  _And I don’t want it._

He wants —

Aziraphale’s voice, entrenched so deep in his memory like a second conscience, speaks as if invoked.  _‘May you be forgiven.’_

Scum of the earth, the unforgivable to be absolved, the last choice to be made in an act of infinite mercy. 

_What leads your touch? Why do you touch me? Why me? Is it out of mercy?_

And then question after question, _why does it matter?_ Why does he want to be wanted for what is now and never the shimmer of potential of returning to what was and could have grown differently? What _is_ the aim, here? To crave being singled out, seen through and —

Not forgiven. Understood, perhaps.

Crowley swallows, blinking, tilting his head to look ahead, at the faint outline of the docks swaying away from him. 

He wants something new, a new solution.

He stands up on wobbly legs, tendons stiff from humidity, straightens. The wind pushes at his back, tilting the boat. Crowley feels the resistance when he holds his breath and falls into the water: backwards, arms outstretched.

 

* * *

 

The cat comes brushing against Crowley’s ankles, then jumps onto the table, using his knees as leverage. He lets himself be scratched, pushing the small patchy head against Crowley’s open palm and purring a worn, wheezy sound that sounds somewhat off.

‘There’s Behemoth,’ Crowley mutters, desperately glad of a distraction, scratching under his chin until the cat wiggles away from him, stepping cautiously between the silverware and fruit, aiming for Aziraphale’s unfinished pie. 

Aziraphale watches his progress warily, stiffened in his seat. ‘You’re not _serious_?’

Crowley shrugs one shoulder. ‘Inside joke. No more demon here that there typically is. Though. It’s still a _cat_.’

‘If you say so,’ Aziraphale says tight;y, wary even as the creature lands ungainly in his lap and curls up into a vibrating bundle. 

‘See, he likes you,’ Crowley mutters tiredly, rubbing at his eyes. 

Tired. He’s still so _tired_. Exhausted, deep in every vein and bone, and well beyond even the physicality, he’s tired. Even after everything, even after having it _voiced_ , at last, that he is wanted here, in a place closest to safety he’s had in years — even now, this lingering feeling of having been  _shattered_ and sewn back with little care, leaving everything thready and askew.

What’s he looking back to? What _is_ there to grieve? 

Aziraphale’s voice sounds stymied, faraway in the muffled myriad of noises around them.

‘Didn’t you just claim he wouldn’t be alone in that proclivity, even in Hell?’

‘Yes, I’m sure you’d manage to make a fool out of Satan himself if you took to it, Aziraphale,’ Crowley sighs, still pressing his eyes into his hands. His head hurts, a dull distant ache of tiredness.

‘Don’t be —’

A spike of irritation, entirely inane. He manages, ‘Take the _compliment_ and shut it.’

‘I wasn’t aware it was a compliment.’

And then he says it, the most hopelessly _stupid_ thing he ever could, and only half-conscious at that. 

‘You’re not aware of many things.’

And of course, of _course_ Aziraphale catches on, all sharp-blue eyes in the suddenly triumphant silence, scratching the cat’s tattered ear absently to the unrelenting rise and fall of a songbird.

‘Yes, I’m afraid you are right,’ he says at length, voice absent. ‘I’m afraid that’s … the difference . Between us.’

‘Oh?’ Crowley asks, stymied. The not-quite-headache spreads, pulsating, through the very nerve endings. 

‘ _Temet nosce_ ,’ Aziraphale says with slow deliberation and Crowley stills. ‘Know thyself. I _didn’t_.’

Lowering his hands, he blinks and opens his eyes.

‘Self-awareness. When you’re accustomed to the act of questioning itself,’ Aziraphale picks up innocuously, circling back to the beginning of the conversation in a dizzying ellipse worthy only of him, ‘it never strikes you as inane to question _yourself_. When you go against the pattern, you get to … see the pattern, I think. You saw it so early.’

There’s a moment of thick, lulling silence, so poignant Crowley half-wants to beg Aziraphale to be _quiet_.

‘And I,’ Aziraphale says at last, voice very quiet and sad, ‘I just had faith.’

 

* * *

 

_II._

 

The water is cold, _cold_. It burns his skin, face, arms and legs, everything crying with shocked nerve endings, rebelling against the assault of wrong sensation.

Is it hard to see the sea as holy? 

Expansive and wrathful, incomprehensible, ruthless and welcoming at the same time. It draws you in. No, it's easy, easy see that the water he sinks into, steady and excruciating, is killing something in him that needs to be killed, particle by particle, stripping away an unshed skin of an old order.

And he sees it. All of it, shattered, ever-happening, spacetimes of frayed experience, elating. Time, time irretrievable, imprinted into the memory of skin, the failing memory of eyes. Scattered images, broken images, cities of life and ruin, water and decay. _Want_ of decay, want of light. Rome, Byzantium, Dresden, Cairo, Florence, Lima. Aziraphale, somehow, always at the core of it.

_(It’s only said because he’s shell-shocked, overwhelmed with a spidery terror strangling any and all clarity of mind._

_Here we are, the world teetering on the brink of ending, and what, this ancient thing between us, this despair of mine, just dies with us unspoken?_

_He says it in desperation, borrowing someone else’s words._

_Aziraphale responds, and it should be easier. Easier to initiate touch, easier to seek confirmation, easier to mutter yourself out of doubt when it comes back tidally, relentless.)_

A question to consider: how to unlearn doubt?

Feeling the pressure of needing oxygen press down on him, choked and lightheaded at the same time, he moves his head up, blinking. Kicks back against the water and moves upwards, thin fingers against fluid eternity. 

He closes his eyes, then spreads his wings, cutting through the water, dividing it. 

He thinks, _I’m praying now. So listen._

 

* * *

 

‘And now?’ Crowley asks, in spite of himself.

Aziraphale is silent for a while. ‘Now maybe I have a different one,’ he says at last, barely even vocal.

The unease swells, ripens, tearing at him from the inside. _I believe yo_ u, Aziraphale had said, in his stuffy husk of a living room, a hollow admission that only becomes more unbearable with time. The hurt thing in his chest thrashes, cold and desperate. Or maybe it’s just a strain of a heart used to sleeping. 

‘Don’t make me your new religion, Aziraphale,’ Crowley whispers.

_ I’d make a lousy god. _

Aziraphale looks up, as though wrested from a trance. With the afternoon-heavy sunlight in slow decay, shrouded with all the softly buzzing small life around him — bees and mites and peppermint, rose hip bushes and the annoyance of a bird hidden in the leaves of the birch tree, all of it — he seems untouchable, and Crowley’s words taste like blasphemy. 

But then, how could he ever hope for them _not_ to.

And yet Aziraphale is still, _still_ looking at him as though he’s misunderstanding, with such disarming uncertainty. He shakes his head.

‘You say this as though you haven’t been at the centre of that old one, Crowley,’ he then says, strangely caustic, but — even more oddly, perhaps — _not_ hostile. ‘And for millennia, at that.’

Crowley swallows, but his throat is dry. 

A warm feeling now. It comes tidally, cold terror and then this panic of choking-warm emotion, perhaps even more uprooting. 

He feels, now, stripped clean of any and all defences. He looks around, distraught — even the cat, even his blasted _cat_ has deserted him, pointedly asleep in Aziraphale’s lap. His coffee is cold. Skin itching, _burning_ , he wants to leave the table and go up to the greenhouse, or curl to sleep in the hammock till prickly morning, to wean it out again, cool it back into the bland state of interim existence he is so used to.

But he also _doesn’t_.

‘What ‘bout that self-awareness, then?’ he mumbles, staring at a crease in the table cloth. Linen. Lithuanian.

‘Self-awareness lets you name a feeling,’ Aziraphale says, voice warm now, as if he’s smiling. ‘It doesn’t make you _feel_ it.’

‘Ah,’ Crowley says. His hands are shaking so much he nearly drops the cup when he reaches for it out of sheer nerves. ‘So you felt?’

Oh, what sheer _idiocy_. His lips feel numb, as if burnt by the gone-cold coffee. But Aziraphale, blast him, has mercy.

It’s quiet. ‘I felt.’

Crowley opens his mouth, closes it. 

‘You said it wouldn’t change anything, if you said _you_ did,’ Aziraphale continues, voice even, low. Lulling. ‘But suppose I did. Suppose I wasn’t a coward and I said it loud and clear, I’m drawn to you, despite everything, I’m drawn to you desperately, and no matter where I leave you, I’ll come back. Would — would you have run?’

What a wicked thing to have your own projection spoken aloud to you, your age-old yearning. What a wicked thing, to _let_ _dream_.

He wants to deflect, spare Aziraphale something, say _yes_. He wants to burn up with the feeling that’s eating him alive anyway, and say _no_.

‘I don’t know,’ he says, not really knowing how to lie anymore. 

 

* * *

 

He lays still, letting the water hold him, eyes closed. The sun has settled, sweetened, warming his water-frosted skin where he floats on the surface, tinging what’s behind his closed eyelids orange. He breathes through his nose, slow steady breaths, listening to the water. Tide by tide, tide by tide. _Time_.

_May you be forgiven._

The light breaks apart, brightens-darkens in a flurry of movement. There’s _sound_ , a flapping of wings, a rapid soft noise, loud and overwhelming. Startled, Crowley blinks, registering only a scattering of light over the water, shattered by discordant white feathers. 

Then there’s touch.

Aziraphale’s shaky hands, dissonantly warm and soft, plucking blindly at his clothes, face, repeating his _name,_ over and over again, ‘Crowley, _Crowley_.’

Crowley blinks again, properly seeing. He reaches up to steady himself on Aziraphale’s shoulder.

‘Angel,’ he manages, incontinent warmth blooming vaguely in the very nerve endings, unbidden. ‘What —’

Aziraphale’s clothes are buttoned haphazardly, his hair in a disarray. He must have only just woken up, he’s warm and hazy and threaded with _worry_. It’s hard to properly read his expression against the now-bright sky, but his eyes are searching Crowley’s face.

‘I thought you’ve jumped,’ he’s saying, breathlessly, hands still restless, ‘I saw you from the cliff, I thought — Crowley, don’t you, _don’t_.’

Dizzied, with his throat tight, Crowley lets his water-cold hands wander and settle. 

‘I didn’t jump,’ he croaks out. 

Aziraphale’s hands find his face again, his voice taut like a string.

‘Is-is this how you felt?’ he stammers. ‘In the bookshop, when I — is this what this is?’

Sharp sting of awareness.

‘No,’ Crowley snaps, sobering, ‘I wasn’t trying to — bloody _hell_ , Aziraphale, I’d never do that.’

Aziraphale’s voice is shaky. ‘It wouldn’t be undeserved.’

‘Yes, it would,’ Crowley interrupts, dizzy. ‘Yes it would, you absolute —’

‘Come up to the boat,’ Aziraphale says, weakly. ‘ _Please_.’

Disarmed, Crowley lets himself be gathered, pulled up from the water, into the abandoned boat. Aziraphale is still so shockingly _warm_ against his blue-cold skin and soaked heavy wool, so improbably _factual_.

The victory of defeat is short-lived, as always, as any between them. He only sees the extent of Aziraphale’s panic when the angel lets go of him and demands, short of breath and visibly full of some barely-contained emotion,

‘Then what, for Hell’s sake, _what_ were you doing, Crowley?’

As though sensing vulnerability, the wind picks up, picking at his wet clothes and nuzzling skin. Crowley shivers, strangely content with the harsh sensation. Thoughts are swarming his head, disjointed, buzzing like a hive. He tries to trace a beginning of some sentence but can’t.

‘Thinking,’ he says discordantly, enduring the hard expression of the angel’s shrewd blue eyes. 

The boats sways in the wind. He shivers again, harder.

Taking pity, Aziraphale miracles him dry with a slight brush of hand. _Aziraphale’s dear old hands._ _Aziraphale’s dear kind face._

‘Thinking?’ he echoes, doubtful. Some colour is returning to him, dispersing previous half-conscious agitation. ‘By trying to _drown?_ Crowley, for Hell’s … is it like … is it like your sleeping?’

Crowley blinks, thrown off balance. ‘My sleeping?’ he repeats, uncertainly. He’s regaining proper sense in his hands, skin tingling. He still can’t focus.

‘When you sleep too much, or, or drink too much to … to take the edge off.’

Mildly unsettled by the fact Aziraphale remembers a throwaway quip he’s come up with once to spare himself being further questioned so acutely, Crowley inhales through the nose. ‘No, I —’ he trails off.

Bent white _feathers_ , pressed at an odd angle into dark ones, over his own knees between Aziraphale’s knees.

‘No one has seen you,’ he mutters, ‘angel?’

Aziraphale stares at him, expression pinched. There are shadows under his eyes, as though to match Crowley.

‘Crowley, I didn’t much _care_ ,’ he says quietly.

Crowley bites his lip.

Behind Aziraphale, on the dewy shoreline, a human man is standing, looking straight at them. A fisherman, a fisherman in a yellow oiler, with face swarthy and lined from age and sun and narrowed disbelieving eyes. 

_Have I lost focus?_ Crowley thinks briefly, eyes meeting eyes. Slowly, he raises his hand. _Or have I lost touch?_

_‘Shalom alechem!’_ he yells, voice hoarse at the vowels, startling Aziraphale. The angel turns rapidly, spots the stony-faced man on the coast and gives a vague apologetic wave of hand. The fisherman’s cloudy eyes, set in a myriad of wrinkles, move slowly from Crowley to him, then settle intently on the white wings. 

Crowley tries again, loud and hoarse, ‘Hey! Peace be unto you!’

He stares a little more intently, gripping the side of the boat. At last the man blinks, thrown off — then slowly raises his hand to mirror Crowley’s gesture in valediction, before turning stiffly and walking away. 

Crowley stares after him.

Aziraphale’s voice, if possible, is even more hesitant than it has been. And softer. ‘Crowley, are you _alright_?’

‘I’m fine,’ Crowley says, voice cracking. He doesn’t tear his eyes from the fisherman. There’s a funny sensation in his chest that he has trouble rationalising.

‘Just,’ he mumbles. ‘Thinking about things.’

The light is cooling, pink and grey to a more lucid blue. His head has quietened down.

‘You said once,’ he starts at last, stymied, deliberate, trying to follow the spindly thought methodically to its very end, ‘that you _forgave_ me.’

‘I wouldn’t say it now.’

He looks up, momentarily distracted. But Aziraphale’s face is tense, wary, like he’s still waiting for some world to end.

‘No?’ Crowley echoes, quiet. ‘Why not?’

‘There’s,’ Aziraphale says, looking down at his own hands, splaying them on his knees, ‘nothing to forgive.’

Crowley stares, momentarily disoriented, the feeling of stripped skin becoming strangely overwhelming. Then he inhales, sharply.

‘No,’ he says at length, ‘no, you're right. There isn’t. For either of us.’

He smiles, a brittle thing, meaning to go on. But Aziraphale shakes his head, slowly.

‘I have,’ he says uncertainly, his voice cautious like he fears rupturing something with its very sound, ‘ _hurt_ you. With no intention, but I have.’

Crowley swallows. He can say _yes_ , and stomach the aftermath of pity and guilt, and he can’t. He can say _no_ , and crawl back into the frigid-cold feathery quiet place inside his chest. And he can’t.

And neither is what he wants spoken aloud.

He keeps quiet, looking at the water. The wind is increasing once again, pushing at his back and head and shirtsleeves, oddly elating. _Elevating_. Crowley stands up, picking up one of the unused oars and beginning slowly, patiently steering them back into the docks.

‘Have you ever baptised anyone?’ he asks, voice brittle but clear, trying to calm his heart. ‘Needs Holy Water, doesn’t it. The whole shindig.’

He raises his eyes to look at Aziraphale and sees the unbearable lost confusion on his familiar face, lit up now from the leam of dawning sun still sheathed in clouds. 

‘I have,’ Aziraphale confirms, voice cautious. ‘But Crowley —’

‘No, _hush_ ,’ Crowley says quickly, abruptly. ‘Bear with me.’

He turns and nearly stumbles, trying to balance in the small boat, and lands in a graceless flurry of limbs back between Aziraphale’s knees. 

His heart is beating fast, as though trying to escape his chest — but now incited with a jittery want he doesn’t know how to suppress, doesn’t _want_ to suppress. 

He looks into Aziraphale’s well-worn face, it’s soft lines and small tilting angles. He wants to voice it somehow, that none of that old fumbling _matters_ now — that it _shouldn’t_ matter, and he is slowly unlearning to be caught in it all. There’s no easy word for it.

Or maybe there is, but not in such a language.

Trembling with the euphoria of being at the brink of understanding and making his understanding communicable, he takes Aziraphale’s hands in his. He stills at the touch.

‘I don’t want to go back,’ he says softly. ‘To the past, to any of it. We said what we needed to,  and did what we had to. I know I’m … difficult. To follow. Maybe … maybe I go too fast, yeah, or maybe I go in blind and stumble like a fool. But I don’t want a return, I want — a redoing. You said, would I have run, back then. I don’t know. I know I won’t run now. I’m _not_ running now.’

Aziraphale’s hands are warmer, skin softer, seemingly so much more alive than Crowley’s bony long fingers and wrists. But the warmth is travelling — splitting, filling him slowly and waveringly, firing up old nerves. Soon he’ll be burning up. 

_Aziraphale is light._

And so Crowley is the thing that moves alongside, a shadow relentless and stubborn, all the scattered particles suddenly wrenched out of order. Crowley goes with light.

He’s almost choked with emotion. But not this time, no evasions. There’s no point in any more _waste_. 

‘I wasn’t trying to drown. I just wanted to … wash it off. _Baptizo_ , to immerse. Right? It’s like the rain. An ending.’

‘And you want —’ Aziraphale hesitates. Crowley brushes his thumb past his right hand, raises it to press a kiss to the the knuckles.  

‘I don’t know,’ Crowley murmurs. ‘We’ve done it, we’ve _defeated_ the Plan. We’ve _reached_  the destination. Carthage. London. Yershalaim. The garden of Eden. Same hat. This is _it_ : afterlife starts now.’

Aziraphale blinks.

‘Full circle,’ he says at length, looking at their joined hands. ‘ _There will be no other end of the world?_ Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Maybe not,’ Crowley says, lowering Aziraphale’s hand but not letting go, ‘or maybe there will be. But I — I want out.’

‘Out?’ Aziraphale repeats, sounding mildly breathless. Crowley nods, swallowing.

_We should have switched minds_ , he thinks, almost delirious. _A language to end all. Why speak if all this should be made clear to us. You had faith and I_ wanted _to have it. I was the question, you had the answer. I saw and you wanted to see._

‘You know what Dante gave all the kind godless philosophers?’ he says instead. ‘The first circle, _limbo_. Eternal peace. It’s Hell but it’s not. It’s Heaven, but it’s not. I want the peace. I want _life_. I’m _tired_ of being a witness.’

But perhaps to some extent it’s already there, some strange and infallible connection, because at last, Aziraphale smiles, a radiant thing, if somewhat wobbly.

‘A parable of serene unrest,’ he says, teasing, and Crowley feels the warmth bloom inside him, giddy now.

‘A parable of falling,’ he says, ‘right out of the pattern.’

An apocryphal little vision: a new patron of lost things, a new patron of finding them. A professor and a gardener. A cottage. A cat. The world still in flux, still so surprised at itself, but slowly reinventing own cycles and laws, relearning how to turn. Crowley feels it in his bones, now that he takes care to pay attention.

‘ _Shantih_ ,’ he says, grinning. ‘Life starts now.’

 

 

_These fragments I have shored against my ruins_

_Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe._

_Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata._

_Shantih     shantih     shantih_

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> can i get a ... can i get a wahoo? or ... a spare review ma'am?
> 
> also i rly didnt know how to tonally incorporate it into this fic but just know that at any given moment i think abt aziraphale asking, whats the best type of firework to buy and crowley goes wouldn’t u like to know weatherboy
> 
> where are your parents

**Author's Note:**

> can. can u tell i’m going through something
> 
> i hope it wasn't too terrible. i’d like to thank misters auden and eliot for giving me all my 3 feelings i proceeded to hurt by considering the grief and guilt and love that could be derived from this here scenario
> 
> please talk to me, i am lowkey intimidated by my inbox here but i’m trying to be better!!!!! i am!!!!!!! i am also desperate for love
> 
> u can also find me on twitter (lvsliescribbles) and tumblr (lvslie)
> 
> update: fixed up some things!!!!


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